TEAR 2014 - 9th International Workshop on Trends in Enterprise Architecture Research (TEAR'14)

The international TEAR workshop series brings together Enterprise Architecture (EA) researchers from different research communities and provides a forum to present EA research results and to discuss future EA research directions.
The field of Enterprise Architecture (EA) has gained considerable attention over the last of years. EA is important because organisations need to adapt increasingly fast to changing customer requirements and business goals. This need influences the entire chain of activities of an enterprise, from business processes to IT support. Moreover, a change in a particular part of the overall architecture may influence many other parts of the architecture. For example, when a new product is introduced, business processes for production, sales and after-sales need to be adapted. It might be necessary to change applications, or even adapt the IT infrastructure. Each of these fields will have its own (partial) architectures. To keep the enterprise architecture coherent and aligned with the business goals, the relations between these different architectures must be explicit, and a change should be carried through methodically in all architectures. In contrast to traditional architecture management approaches such as IT architecture, software architecture or IS architecture, EA explicitly incorporates “pure” business-related artifacts in addition to traditional IS/IT artifacts. For Enterprise Architecture the focus is on the overall enterprise and concerns its organization, its components, the relationship between components and principles governing its design and evolution.
In previous years the emergence of service oriented design paradigms (e.g. Service-oriented Architecture, SoA) contributed to the relevance of EA. The need to design business services and IT services and align them forced companies to pay more attention to business architectures. The growing complexity of existing application landscapes lead to increased attention to application architectures at the same time. To better align business and IS architectures a number of major companies started to establish EA efforts after introducing the service-oriented architecture style.
Until recently, practitioners, consulting firms and tool vendors have been leading in the development of the EA discipline. Research on EA has been taking place in relatively isolated communities. The main objective of this workshop series is to bring these different communities of EA researchers together and to identify future directions for EA research. Important questions concern research methodology and the interaction between research and EA practice.