Analysis Using the Business Support Matrix: Elaborating Potential for Improving Application Landscapes in Logistics

The Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) discipline aims at deriving relevant IT support for a company from its strategy and business architecture. It, therefore, provides an extensive set of tools for describing and analyzing architecture for a given organization. One of the central tools bridging the gap between business and IT is the Business Support Matrix (BSM). It provides a high-level overview on business-related abstractions (e.g. business processes or functions) and their supporting software applications. The paper at hand presents and approach basing on the BSM for determining optimization potential in the application landscape of a large logistics company in Germany. This approach includes some basic key performance indicators (KPI) as well as a categorization of software applications in a corporate environment based on business support. It has been developed and evaluated in a German logistics company and is still evolving.