Open Access

Roy Oberhauser, Marie Baehre, Pedro Sousa

• Enterprise digitalization results in an evolving and dynamic IT landscape of digital elements, relations, knowledge, content, activities, and business processes (BPs), which are spread across disparate enterprise IT systems, repositories, and tools. To be relevant, useful, and actionable, Enterprise Architecture (EA) relies on comprehensive documentation based on underlying information corresponding to reality. Yet current diagram-centric 2D visualizations for EA and BP models are too limited in scope to express reality (intentionally simplifying), are typically static (and not kept up-to-date), and cannot express and integrate the changing complexities of the enterprise context. This misalignment with reality and a changing enterprise misinforms and constrains the context-awareness and perception of EA and BP for stakeholders, impeding analyses, management, and holistic insights into the enterprise digital reality. This paper contributes our nexus-based Virtual Reality (VR) solution concept VR-EvoEA+BP to support comprehensive enterprise context visualization in conjunction with EA and model evolution and BP mining and analysis. Portraying an organic, evolving, and dynamic enterprise while supplementing static enterprise structure depictions, our implementation demonstrates its feasibility. A case study based on enterprise analysis and BP scenarios exhibits its potential.