Context driven approach for enterprise architecture framework

Abstract

Decision making process within the enterprise is complex due to unavailability of widely accepted, flexible and dynamic Enterprise Architecture Framework (EAF) that comprises of service-based applications and has strong dependency on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Rapidly changing business scenarios have become normal characteristics of SOA based applications and Enterprise Information System. Existing non-SOA based EAFs are lacking of flexibility, scalability, context sensitivity, re-configurability and agility. On the other hand, existing SOA-based EAFs are merely capable to handle context sensitivity, reusability and agility of Enterprise Information System. To address such issues, this paper proposes a novel SOA-based EAF, called SCORE architecture, comprised of five loosely coupled layers namely, Subject layer, Context layer, Object layer, Role layer and Essence layer. Moreover, a set of relationships are proposed for SCORE architecture to exhibits the intra-layer and inter-layer associations among the constructs of different layers. Further, the inter-layer interactions and message flows in SCORE framework are analyzed using UML notations. The proposed enterprise architecture is illustrated using a suitable case study. Finally, a comparative study is performed with the Zachman Framework [1], to exhibit the benefits of the proposed EAF in the context of Enterprise Information system.