Empowering Business Users to Analyze Enterprise Architectures: Structural Model Matching to Configure Visualizations

Abstract

Visualizations are common means to analyze Enterprise Architecture (EA) models and support decision makers with relevant information on organizational processes, information systems, infrastructure, and their interconnections. These EA visualizations are tailored typically to the specific information demand of stakeholders. Currently, creating such stakeholder-specific visualizations requires experts with a strong technical background due to complex configurations and inflexible tool solutions. In particular business users often lack technical expertise. At the same time, their concerns and questions often arise spontaneously. In this vein, visualizations that can be generated without expert knowledge would enable business users to perform ad-hoc analyses of an EA information model. Against this background, we propose a solution which facilitates analyses of arbitrary EA information models by non-technical stakeholders. Our approach is based on ad-hoc, configurable visualizations. We introduce an end-user friendly wizard that lowers the barrier for the creation of EA visualizations. The wizard is based on structural pattern matching of models. Key to our approach are abstract viewpoints that model best-practice knowledge of EA visualizations and abstract view models which model the information demand of abstract viewpoints. Our contributions in this paper are 1) a meta-information model capable to capture both the technical information demand of an abstract viewpoint and the information offer of an EA information model, 2) a pattern matching algorithm calculating viable configurations for bindings of visualizations to information, and 3) a wizard to support non-technical stakeholders with the creation of these visualizations. We present an implementation of our approach and show user interface design of the wizard. The wizard recommends feasible configurations automatically in order to unburden the configuration process for non-technical stakeholders.