Ordering stakeholder viewpoint concerns for holistic and incremental Enterprise Architecture: the W6H framework

TL;DR

This paper extends the traditional W5H framework for Enterprise Architecture by adding 'which' to form W6H, establishing an ordering of viewpoints based on linguistic analysis to support holistic and agile EA development.

Contribution

It introduces the W6H framework with an ordered set of interrogatives, enhancing the completeness and applicability of EA frameworks like Zachman, especially for iterative and agile processes.

Findings

Adding 'which' improves EA completeness.

Ordered viewpoints facilitate holistic EA creation.

W6H supports agile and iterative EA methods.

Abstract

Context: Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a discipline which has evolved to structure the business and its alignment with the IT systems. One of the popular enterprise architecture frameworks is Zachman framework (ZF). This framework focuses on describing the enterprise from six viewpoint perspectives of the stakeholders. These six perspectives are based on English language interrogatives 'what', 'where', 'who', 'when', 'why', and 'how' (thus the term W5H Journalists and police investigators use the W5H to describe an event. However, EA is not an event, creation and evolution of EA challenging. Moreover, the ordering of viewpoints is not defined in the existing EA frameworks, making data capturing process difficult. Our goals are to 1) assess if W5H is sufficient to describe modern EA and 2) explore the ordering and precedence among the viewpoint concerns. Method: we achieve our goals by bringing tools from the Linguistics, focusing on a full set of English Language interrogatives to describe viewpoint concerns and the inter-relationships and dependencies among these. Application of these tools is validated using pedagogical EA examples. Results: 1) We show that addition of the seventh interrogative 'which' to the W5H set (we denote this extended set as W6H) yields extra and necessary information enabling creation of holistic EA. 2) We discover that particular ordering of the interrogatives, established by linguists (based on semantic and lexical analysis of English language interrogatives), define starting points and the order in which viewpoints should be arranged for creating complete EA. 3) We prove that adopting W6H enables creation of EA for iterative and agile SDLCs, e.g. Scrum. Conclusions: We believe that our findings complete creation of EA using ZF by practitioners, and provide theoreticians with tools needed to improve other EA frameworks, e.g., TOGAF and DoDAF.