A Proposal of a Situational Approach for Enterprise Architecture Frameworks: Application to TOGAF

Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks have justified their efficiency to improve the enterprise functioning by providing a whole vision of an organization aligned to its strategy. However, these frameworks are often heavy and are not used integrally as they are not completely suitable for the situation at hand. To tackle this problem, we suggest using a component-based vision of EA frameworks. Our goal is to identify a set of EA components that could be used independently from each other and to use them depending on the context. This approach could be used to implement the whole EA method in an organization, to provide a progressive integration of different components, or to improve an existing EA by adding the lacking components. We called our proposal the SEA (Situational Enterprise Architecture) approach. In this paper, we propose a model to formalize EA components and illustrate this model with the TOGAF framework.