Management of complexity in enterprise integration projects by the PERA methodology

The issue of the presentation and management of complexity is one of the most important aspects of the development and use of enterprise reference architectures and their associated methodologies. There is a limit to the degree of detail that any level of decision-making can comprehend adequately. As the breadth of vision of a decision expands the degree of detail must be correspondingly reduced. It is thus impossible to present every detail of any real world problem. The presentation has to be based on the principle of minimal complexity at any point. Therefore, the formalism of an enterprise reference architecture needs only to capture the most important factors at each stage of complexity. A hierarchical approach is thus inevitable. This article proposes a four-level formalism as a hierarchical model for use in further studies on the presentation of complexity management. These four levels include architectural, interface, design tool and semantic methods. The impact of complexity management on workflow design for enterprise integration is also discussed.