Enterprise information architectures, like the Zachman framework or TOGAF, have been designed for use by experienced business executives within large corporations. Other enterprise information frameworks, like CSC Catalyst, were established to support business and technical consultants in their IT related consulting work towards clients. These frameworks are quite elaborate and rely on extensive practical business experience of the users. However, these properties make it very difficult to teach such frameworks at an undergraduate or even graduate level in a business education program, where students have neither the background nor the experience of senior business executives or senior IT consultants.

In this paper we present a simplified but effective framework for an enterprise information architecture, suited for teaching in a business curriculum, at both the undergraduate and the graduate level. Th framework consists of several elements, representing the (1) different aspects of an IT system, (2) the phases in the lifecycle of the system, (3) subsequent models of the system and (4) specific topics of interest. The framework allows the students to analyze any IT system and to relate all techniques of IT systems development and –management to a single framework. We show how this framework is related to the major enterprise architecture frameworks. We also show why this framework is suited for teaching. It simplifies complex concepts and relates them to well-known concepts of (brick-and-mortar) architecture and to common-sense engineering practices. We present different versions of the framework, suited for teaching at the undergraduate and at the graduate level, the graduate level putting higher demands on conceptualization and analytic skills.

Finally, we report our experiences with the teaching of this enterprise information architecture framework at the Hogeschool-Universiteit at Brussels and during an international summerschool at Hof (Germany) where the framework was taught to a mix of graduate and undergraduate IT students of 20 nationalities.