Towards a Contingency Framework for Engineering an Enterprise Architecture Planning Method

Abstract

Enterprise architecture (EA) has a key role in managing and relating business strategies and processes, information systems, and IC technologies. EA planning devises an EA plan with development steps to make necessary enhancements to the current state of the affairs in EA. Accomplishing EA planning in a systematic and efficient manner requires the availability of frameworks and methods suitable to the situation at hand. The selection and adaptation of these methodical artifacts for the use of EA planning is often quite challenging in practice. We argue that the contingency approach can help in these activities of method engineering (ME), and present a contingency framework (named here EACon, EA Contingencies) for engineering an EA planning method. The framework is composed of three layers: the topmost layer pertains to a method engineering context, the next lower layer corresponds to an EA planning context, and the lowest layer stands for an EA development context. Due to the largeness of the framework, this paper focuses on the topmost layer. The contingency framework has been derived from ISD contingency factors, conceptualizations of the ME domain, EA critical success factors, and experience obtained from a large national project of engineering an EA planning method for state administration.