Bu09u - Teaching Enterprise Architecture Management A Practical Experience

Abstract

Enterprise architecture (EA) management is one of the major challenges of modern enterprises. It aims at aligning business and IT in order to optimize their interaction. Although a high demand for experts in this context exists, experiences and proven practices in teaching EA management, e.g. in university contexts are scarce. This misalignment can be explained on the one hand by the variety of problems addressed in the context of EA management and on the other hand by the challenge of reproducing organizational contexts, e.g. the different problems an enterprise architect has to deal with in the specific setting of an enterprise, like the existing culture, in a laboratory environment.

This report describes the structure, results, and lessons learned of a method to teach EA management based on experiences gained in a course at the Technische Universität München in the summer term 2009. The course follows a twofold approach consisting of a lecture, which provides theoretical knowledge in the area of EA management, and so-called ”mini projects”, which were conducted by student teams in cooperation with industry partners. The objective of the course is to equip students both with theoretical knowledge and a practical understanding of challenges arising in the context of managing complex EAs. Thus, the course builds on existing best practice solutions, EA management patterns, which are documented, reused, or developed to solve the problem of the industry partner.