Realizing Traceability from the Business Model to Enterprise Architecture.

An enterprise architecture (EA) is a high-level representation of the enterprise, used for managing the relation between business and IT. In order to improve reasoning about the contribution of IT to the business, all elements of an EA should be traceable to the business model and vice versa. However, in practice this is not the case. Realizing this traceability would be useful because it would allow practitioners to reason about the contribution of IT to the Business Model of the organization. In addition to reasoning about cost structures and goal contributions of IT to the business, as is customary in EA, practitioners would also be able to reason about the contribution of IT to the value offerings of a business. In this exploratory paper we investigate traceability between the EA, Business Model and Business Goals of an enterprise. We use ArchiMate as the EA language and e(3)-value as the business modeling language, provide and motivate a hypothesis about how to realize traceability, and illustrate this with a real-world example. Our paper ends with a traceability hypothesis that will be further tested in future case studies.