USING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS FOR ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE VISUALIZATION

In today's business the optimization of the alignment between Business and IT can be assessed as a critical success factor for enterprises. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is used by enterprises for providing an integrated environment in order to support this Business-IT-Alignment. But establishing EA practice still remains a challenging endeavor with low success rates. Mayor reasons for that are the high complexity of the enterprise models and the resultant necessity for stakeholder specific visualization of the enterprise model, the different information requirements of different stakeholder groups, and the not sufficient integration of EA in the management processes and IT management tools used by a company. For this reason we argue that the business management of an enterprise and the Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) of the company should be integrated in a more consistent way to minimize application proliferation and to avoid information system silos. One possibility for achieving this is to provide and to visualize all necessary management information in only one IT-tool which is well integrated in the management processes of a company. In the business management context Business Intelligence (BI) systems are information integrators which allow stakeholder specific visualization and analyses of high quality and integrated business data. Also EAM systems have to collect, to manage and to visualize information from one or various sources. In this paper we demonstrate how information needed by EAM can also be modelled, stored, and business friendly visualized within a BI system. Thus, we demonstrate how Enterprise Architecture Visualization can be managed by a BI system.