Learning perspectives of enterprise architectures through TrAM

Engaging with case studies and reasoning about complex business situations allows theoretical and practical skills to be practiced and developed by students as if they were industrial practitioners. There are often several solutions to enterprise architecture designs, and being able to abstract and conceptualise about enterprise architecture develops the students' design and analytical skills in preparation of industrial practice. The Transaction Agent Modelling (TrAM) framework enhances this practice in that it deepens the design thinking for transaction agent modelling and transactions within enterprise architecture through capturing its underlying business semantics. Core to TrAM are Conceptual Graphs (CG). We reflect on good examples produced by student design groups applying TrAM to case studies as simulation of industrial practice. The paper reveals the key lessons that can be learnt from these good examples and how its guidelines can be derived to improve the use of TrAM in industry, stimulated by the student experience.