ABSTRACT

Businesses describe their enterprise architecture using an Enterprise Architecture Framework (EAF), which is a structure for documenting the architecture of their IT systems. Usually, each business uses its own EAF, which may or may not be documented. If undocumented, the EAF is a kind of implicit conceptual metamodel of the architecture of their IT systems. However, when different businesses want to cooperate, they have to relate their EAFs to each other, and this means they should document their EAFs. While doing so a common understanding of each others EAFs is needed. We do not claim that businesses should replace the EAF they work with and that all change to the same EAF, but as far as existing EAFs are built on different abstraction mechanisms it is necessary to understand each others frameworks in order to be able to communicate in a reasonable way. An EAF, capable to integrate existing frameworks, is useful for this task, because it can show how the integrated EAFs relate to each other.