A Taxonomy for Enterprise Architecture Analysis Research

Enterprise Architecture (EA) practitioners and researchers have put a lot of effort into formalizing EA model representation by defining sophisticated frameworks and meta-models. Because EA modelling is a cost and time-consuming effort, it is reasonable for organizations to expect to extract value from EA models in return. Due to the plethora of models, techniques, and stakeholder concerns in literature, the task of choosing an analysis approach might be challenging when no guidance is provided. Even worse, the design of analysis efforts might be redundant if there is no systematization of the analysis techniques due to the inefficient dissemination of practices and results. This paper contributes with one important step to overcome those issues by screening existing EA analysis literature and defining a taxonomy to classify EA research according to their analysis concerns, analysis techniques, and modelling languages employed. The proposed taxonomy had a significant coverage tested with a set of 46 papers also collected from the literature. Our work thus identifies and systematizes the state of art of EA analysis and further, establishes a common language for researchers, tool designers, and EA subject matter experts.