Enterprise architecture management patterns for company-wide access views on business objects

Modern application landscapes consist of a multitude of inter-connected business applications exchanging data in many ways. These business applications are used by employees who take on several organizational roles. However, when broadening the scope to an enterprise-wide perspective, lack of clarity prevail with respect to the questions which roles have access to which business applications as well as the business objects managed by them. This paper focuses on challenges related to enterprise-wide availability of business objects and compliance and associated confidentiality aspects. Motivated by best practices from industry, this paper describes patterns to develop, analyze, and justify an enterprise-wide access matrix. The paper presents three enterprise architecture management (EAM) patterns. The methodology pattern describes the steps to be performed to document, analyze, and manage the access on business objects; the viewpoint pattern provides respective graphical models facilitating a business object access management on enterprise-level; the information model pattern defines the concepts and relationships that need to be documented in order to create the graphical model.