One important role of Enterprise Architecture aims at modeling enterprise artifacts and their relationships, ranging from the high-level concepts to physical ones such as communication networks and enterprise premises. As it is well known, these artifacts evolve over time, as well as their relationships. The dynamic nature of such artifacts has been a difficulty not only in modeling but also in keeping enterprise blueprints updated. This paper presents our approach to handle blueprints of the Enterprise Architecture, based on several years and projects in large organizations, both in the financial and telecommunication industry.
We started by considering “projects” as the changing elements of Enterprise artifacts and achieve a scenario where blueprints are automatically generated and updated, and a time bar allows traveling from the past (AS-WAS), to the present (AS-IS) and to the future scenarios (TO-BE). The paper also presents an overview of the underlying model, the applied methodology and the blueprints that we found to be a valuable instrument amongst elements of different communities: Project Management, IT Governance and IT Architecture. In spite that the cases studies are targeted to the IT domain, the lessons are valid for other architectural areas.