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Towards a Language for Enterprise Architecture Documentation and Analysis - Extending the Meta Object Facility

Enterprise Architecture (EA) management is widely alluded to as an important challenge for today’s enterprises. Different approaches from literature target this topic and emphasize on the importance of analyzing the EA as part of the management function. In this respect, different analysis techniques have been proposed, each based on a different representation of the EA in a model. Largely disconnected, different methods for documenting and planning the EA and her evolution have been discussed, leading to object-oriented models for this purpose – the so called information models. While these both areas are maturing independently, we experience a low cohesion between them. In particular, the models created for documentation as well as planning on the one hand and the models used for analyses on the other hand differ strongly, when it comes to the underlying meta models and concepts. In this paper, we aim at closing the gap resulting from the aforementioned fact. To do so, we discuss the requirements for a suitable object-oriented meta model and exemplify the requirements with an extension to the OMG’s Meta Object Facility.