The first workshop on Trends in Enterprise Architecture Research (TEAR) was held in conjunction with the Enterprise Computing Conference (EDOC) in Hong Kong in October 2006. The positive response to that event encouraged us to hold the second workshop before a full year had passed. TEAR 2007 is therefore co-located with the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) in St. Gallen, Switzerland in June 2007.

The discipline of enterprise architecture is commonly considered to have its birth in an academic article by John Zachman published by the research-oriented IBM Systems Journal. The growth of the discipline, however, took place mainly in the practitioners’ cradle. In recent years, the industrial and governmental interest in enterprise architecture has increased dramatically. Meanwhile, there has been steady academic work in the area, but research on enterprise architecture has been taking place in relatively isolated communities. The main objective of this workshop is to bring these different communities of EA researchers together and to identify trends and major research challenges in EA research. This workshop will provide a discussion forum where researchers and practitioners can meet and exchange experiences, problems and ideas related to EA.

The program for TEAR 2007 is an exiting one. The papers consider the domain of enterprise architecture from a number of perspectives, including those of the business manager, the IT decision maker, the enterprise architecture analyst, the enterprise architecture student, and the project manager.

The first two papers of the proceedings indicate that enterprise architecture is maturing as a discipline. In recent years, calls for more concrete evidence on the benefits of enterprise architecture have been heard. In answer to this, Joachim Schelp and Matthias Stutz present an approach based on the balanced scorecard concept for assessing the value delivered by enterprise architecture. Another sign of the maturing of the discipline is the need for undergraduate education on the topic. In the second paper, Alain Wegmann, Gil Regev, José Diego de la Cruz, Lam-Son Lê, and Irina Rychkova present the structure and contents of such a course on enterprise architecture and service-oriented architecture.

As a further sign of the maturing of the discipline, the proposals of new models (or metamodels) for enterprise architecture are increasingly complemented by considerations on the stringent use of such models. In particular, the models may be employed for answering pertinent questions; they may be analyzed. The next three papers consider various analyses that may be performed on enterprise architecture models. Stephan Aier and Marten Schönherr present a method and algorithm for identifying clusters of business processes and IT systems. Using this method, it is possible to further the alignment between business and IT in the enterprise. Robert Lagerström’s paper proposes a method for analyzing the modifiability of information system scenarios on the basis of enterprise architecture models. The models can thus be employed to guide the choice between future scenarios. M. El Kourdi, H. Shah, and A. Atkins propose a method, or framework, for analyzing EA repositories with respect to the effects of architecture changes (impact analysis), commonalities between models, and also for the identification of redundancies.

Considering the extension of enterprise architecture to the domain of projects, Ralph Foorthuis and Sjaak Brinkkemper present a framework for project architecture and describe how this framework is related to the overarching enterprise architecture, as well as to various domain architectures. With particular focus on enterprise architecture as a communication tool, Rodrigo Magalhaes, Marielba Zacarias and José Tribolet employ social theory to explain how it can influence collective sensemaking in an organization. The proceeding ends with a paper by Christoph Schroth, proposing an extension of the concept of service-oriented architecture to the structure of human organizations. In the paper, the proposed organizational structure is compared to and supported by organization theory literature.

Several people and organizations deserve our thanks for their support in the realization of this workshop. First of all, we would like to express our gratitude to the authors for submitting their contributions to TEAR and to the program committee members for their effort in reviewing these papers. Furthermore, we are grateful to the Telematica Instituut, the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), and our sponsor BiZZdesign, for supporting us in the time, effort and costs involved in realizing this workshop. Finally, we would like to thank the ECIS 2007 organization, and in particular Robert Winter (general chair), for their support in organizing this workshop as an ECIS Event.

May 10, 2007

Marc Lankhorst, Pontus Johnson

Program Committee

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