Understanding Enterprise Architecture through Bodies of Knowledge - A Conceptual Model.

There is extensive interest in modeling enterprises from a holistic perspective, showing not only the IT infrastructure of an organization, but also how this IT infrastructure supports business processes and how it contributes to the realization of products and services. This interest has led to a large number of papers reporting on Enterprise Architecture. In this paper, we propose a new conceptual model to describe enterprises from a holistic perspective. The proposed model is based on relationships between the ArchiMate language and bodies of knowledge (BOKs). The conceptual model allows to understand how the bodies of knowledge relate to the enterprise architecture. For this, we propose criteria that allow to relate the bodies of knowledge to the perspectives that are defined in the ArchiMate language. Based on the proposed model, this work shows how bodies of knowledge can be used cooperatively inside an enterprise architecture to improve the quality of internal processes in order to generate value for the interests that support their strategic planning. Studies indicate the benefits of ArchiMate in enterprise modeling. Existing studies have already shown the benefits of using BOKs to represent and share available knowledge in and across enterprises. In this work, we go one step further and show how the conceptual alignment of BOKs and ArchiMate advance the understanding of enterprise architectures.