An impact analysis method of business processes evolution in enterprise architecture

Nowadays, enterprises are facing lots of challenges, such as changing market and evolving technologies. Enterprises must continuously adapt themselves to the changing business mode. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an efficient tool to manage enterprise strategies and IT architecture evolution. As a drive for EA evolution, changing business processes promote IT solutions evolution, and make IT architecture to align with business architecture. To maintain the alignment between IT and business during EA evolution, an impact analysis method of business processes evolution is proposed in the paper, which can automatically analyze impacted IT elements based on the dependent chains built by the core concepts in ArchiMate 2.0. Our approach can provide quantitative guidelines for IT architecture evolution and design support for IT architecture transition.