The international TEAR series brings together Enterprise Architecture (EA) researchers from different research communities and provides a forum to present EA research results and to discuss future EA research directions.
The field of Enterprise Architecture (EA) has gained considerable attention over the last of years. EA is important because organisations need to adapt increasingly fast to changing customer requirements and business goals. This need influences the entire chain of activities of an enterprise, from business processes to IT support. Moreover, a change in a particular part of the overall architecture may influence many other parts of the architecture. For example, when a new product is introduced, business processes for production, sales and after-sales need to be adapted. It might be necessary to change applications, or even adapt the IT infrastructure. Each of these fields will have its own (partial) architectures. To keep the enterprise architecture coherent and aligned with the business goals, the relations between these different architectures must be explicit, and a change should be carried through methodically in all architectures. In contrast to traditional architecture management approaches such as IT architecture, software architecture or IS architecture, EA explicitly incorporates “pure” business-related artifacts in addition to traditional IS/IT artifacts. For Enterprise Architecture the focus is on the overall enterprise and concerns its organization, its components, the relationship between components and principles governing its design and evolution.
TEAR: Trends in Enterprise Architecture Research 