Relating business intelligence and enterprise architecture - A method for combining operational data with architectural metadata

Combining enterprise architecture and operational data is complex (especially when considering the actual ‘matching’ of data with enterprise architecture elements), and little has been written on how to do this. In this paper we aim to fill this gap, and propose a method to combine operational data with enterprise architecture to better support decision-making. Using such a method may result in either an enriched enterprise architecture model (which is very suitable as basis for model-based architecture analyses) or a warehouse data model where operational data is enriched with enterprise architecture metadata (which leads to more traceability by easing the retrieval and interpretation of raw data and of business analytics results). The method is illustrated by means of a case and evaluated by experts. Also, a model for mapping enterprise architecture, operational data, and time is proposed, which allows the model-based execution of new types of analyses.