A Viewpoint for Integrating Costs in Enterprise Architecture

Managing and controlling costs is a major concern in every organization. To cope with costs complexity, enterprise models are referred in the literature as solutions to understand that partial view of the reality. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is one of the solutions that is widely used to cover many of the stakeholder’s concerns and viewpoints. However, EA lacks a viewpoint for representing costs. In this paper we present an ArchiMate viewpoint as an extension of any EA model, allowing costs representation. The proposal is grounded in the Time-Driven Activity Based Costing (TDABC) method. Our proposed viewpoint includes the ArchiMate concepts, their relationships and properties enabling the calculation and representation of costs in EA according to TDABC. To validate the usefulness and applicability of the proposal a well-known Harvard case study related with Heart Bypass Surgery is used to formulate a questionnaire. Then, it was applied to EA experts and the results are analysed using a quantitative approach. The paper concludes that representing costs in the architecture is considered as a good option for stakeholders to analyse and draw conclusions about the costs of their business processes and also to enables a better display of cost information when compared to unstructured representations.