Enterprise architecture coherence and the model driven enterprise: is simulation the answer or are we flying kites?

Aligning information communications technology (ICT) to business goals is a common issue cited by senior executives and recent research in measuring alignment provides evidence that those organizations that have aligned successfully their business and IT strategy will out perform those that have not. Enterprise Architecture (EA) aims to capture the essentials of a business, its IT and its evolution, and to support analysis of this information and is thus seen as an important tool for this alignment requirement. However, existing methods, techniques, languages and supporting technology for EA may not be sufficient for helping deliver this agenda and increasingly, simulation is perceived as one such solution. Simulation however presents other challenges, notably, the problem of validity versus credibility. This paper charts a philosophical route through a discussion on models and what they represent, the communication structures implicitly required for models to work and proposes that model based simulation of a model based enterprise can be more effective if there is a theoretical basis to a simulation model. This hypothesis is evaluated by a re-interpretation of Toulmin's Argumentation model as a candidate for the underlying theory for constructing simulations of enterprise architecture coherence. The result of which is used to define an integration strategy with our existing work on lightweight enterprise architecture modelling processes.