Eliciting Business Architecture Information in Enterprise Architecture Frameworks Using VMOST

Enterprise architectures (EA) aim to provide a cohesive information technology (IT) infrastructure by tightly aligning with an enterprise's business environment. To facilitate this, enterprise architecture frameworks (EAF) have been used to understand an enterprise's strategy and business architecture to synthesize a supporting IT strategy. This understanding is critical to the success of an EA. This process is not as simple as consulting an enterprise's strategic plan or mission statement in that they may not capture the tacit strategies and missions of an enterprise's stakeholders. Further, existing EAFs do not provide the necessary guidance to elicit this information. This paper proposes the use of a systematic elicitation approach, VMOST, to understand an enterprise's vision, objectives and processes directly from the perspective of its stakeholders. We assess our approach through interviews with a number of employees across several departments within a University library.