City Planning Approach for Enterprise Information System

Recently, a framework to consider the overall architecture of enterprise information systems (EIS) such as the Enterprise Architecture (EA) has gained increasing popularity in Japan. In this paper, we propose a city planning approach for an EIS comprised of EIS architecture and an EIS Scenario. Our proposed approach leverages the methodology of city planning in civil engineering to provide a framework for portraying an EIS. First, we illustrate an EIS architecture that refers to the architectural description provided by IEEE. Architecture can be described as viewpoints based on stakeholders’ concerns. We focus on three specific viewpoints: “structure,” “part and whole,” and “ins and outs.” To achieve an aggregation of each project and stakeholder concern included in an EIS, we discuss an EIS Scenario that includes a migration plan in terms of a mechanism of program management. Second, we discuss the validity of our framework and discuss its applicability. Our framework is intended to offer management and CIOs a useful methodology for designing EIS architectures from a top level view of the enterprise that takes into consideration several stakeholder viewpoints. Our framework is intended to provide a metaphor for visualizing otherwise unseen EIS architectures.