During the last decade, enterprise architecture has grown into an established approach for holistic management of systems and software in an organization. Enterprise architecture is model-based, in the sense that diagrammatic descriptions of the systems and their environment constitute the core of the approach. A number of enterprise architecture initiatives have been proposed, such as The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), Enterprise Architecture Planning (EAP), the Zachman Framework, Intelligrid, Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) and the military architectural frameworks such as DoDAF, MODAF and NAF. What constitutes a “good” enterprise architecture model has thus far not been clearly defined. The reason is that the “goodness” of a model is not an inherent property, but contingent on the purpose the model is intended to fill, i.e. what kind of analyses it will be subjected to. For instance, if one seeks to employ an enterprise architecture model for evaluating the performance of a system, the information required from the model differs radically from the case when the model is used to evaluate system interoperability.
Enterprise architecture analysis is the application of property assessment criteria on enterprise architecture models. For instance, one investigated property might be the cyber security of a system and a criterion for assessment of this property might be “If the architectural model of the enterprise features an intrusion detection system, then this yields a higher level of information security than if there is no such system.”