Enterprise architecture

Enterprise Architecture is the practice of applying a comprehensive and rigorous method for describing a current or future structure for an organization's processes, information systems, personnel and organizational sub-units, so that they align with the organization's core goals and strategic direction. Although often associated strictly with information technology, it relates more broadly to the practice of business optimization in that it addresses business architecture, performance management and process architecture as well.

Enterprise Architecture is becoming a common practice within the U.S. Federal Government as part of the Capital Planning and Investment Control (CPIC) process. The Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) reference models serve as a framework to guide Federal Agencies in the development of their architectures. The primary purpose of creating an enterprise architecture is to ensure that business strategy and IT investments are aligned. As such, enterprise architecture allows traceability from the business strategy down to the underlying technology.

Companies such as BP, Intel and Volkswagen AG also have applied Enterprise Architecture to improve their business architectures as well in order to improve business performance and productivity.

Enterprise architecture methodology

The practice of Enterprise Architecture involves the application of an architecture framework to describe an "as is" or a "to be" architecture. These frameworks detail the organizations, roles, entities and relationships that exist or should exist to perform a set of business processes. This framework will provide a rigorous taxonomy and ontology that clearly identifies what processes a business performs and detailed information about how those processes are executed. The end product is a set of artifacts that describe in varying degrees of detail exactly what and how a business operates and what resources are required. These artifacts are often graphical.

Given these descriptions, whose levels of detail will vary according to affordability and other practical considerations, decision makers are provided the means to make informed decisions about where to invest resources, where to realign organizational goals and processes, and what policies and procedures will support core missions or business functions.

A strong Enterprise Architecture process helps to answer basic questions like:

Is the current architecture supporting and adding value to the organization?
How might an architecture be modified so that it adds more value to the organization?
Based on what we know about what the organization wants to accomplish in the future, will the current architecture support or hinder that?

Implementing enterprise architecture generally starts with documenting the organization's strategy and other necessary details such as where and how it operates. The process then cascades down to documenting discrete core competencies, business processes, and how the organization interacts with itself and with external parties such as customers, suppliers, and government entities.

Having documented the organization's strategy and structure, the architecture process then flows down into the discrete information technology components such as:

Organization charts, activities, and process flows of how the IT Organization operates
Organization cycles, periods and timing
Suppliers of technology hardware, software, and services
Applications and software inventories and diagrams
Interfaces between applications - that is: events, messages and data flows
Intranet, Extranet, Internet, eCommerce, EDI links with parties within and outside of the organization
Databases and supporting data models
Hardware, platforms, and hosting: servers, and where they are kept
Local and wide area networks, Internet connectivity diagrams

Wherever possible, all of the above should be related explicitly to the organization's strategy, goals, and operations. The Enterprise architecture will document the current state of the technical components listed above, as well as an ideal-world desired future state (Reference Architecture) and finally a "Target" future state which is the result of engineering tradeoffs and compromises vs. the ideal. Essentially the result is a nested and interrelated set of models, usually managed and maintained with specialised software available on the market.

Such exhaustive mapping of IT dependencies has notable overlaps with both Metadata in the general IT sense, and with the ITIL concept of the Configuration Management Database. Maintaining the accuracy of such data can be a significant challenge.

Along with the models and diagrams goes a set of best practices aimed at securing adaptability, scalability, manageability etc. These systems engineering best practices are not unique to Enterprise Architecture but are essential to its success nonetheless. They involve such things as componentization, asynchronous communication between major components, standardization of key identifiers and so on.

Successful application of Enterprise Architecture requires appropriate positioning in the organization. The analogy of city-planning is often invoked in this connection, and is instructive.

An intermediate outcome of an architecture process is a comprehensive inventory of business strategy, business processes, organizational charts, technical inventories, system and interface diagrams, and network topologies, and the explicit relationships between them. The inventories and diagrams are merely tools that support decision making. But this is not sufficient. It must be a living process.

The organization must design and implement a process that ensures continual movement from the current state to the future state. The future state will generally be a combination of one or more:

Closing gaps that are present between the current organization strategy and the ability of the IT organization to support it
Closing gaps that are present between the desired future organization strategy and the ability of the IT organization to support it
Necessary upgrades and replacements that must be made to the IT architecture based on supplier viability, age and performance of hardware and software, capacity issues, known or anticipated regulatory requirements, and other issues not driven explicitly by the organization's functional management.

On a regular basis, the current state and future state are redefined to account for evolution of the architecture, changes in organizational strategy, and purely external factors such as changes in technology and customer/vendor/government requirements.

Relationship to other IT disciplines

Enterprise architecture is a key component of the Information technology governance process at any organization of significant size. More and more companies are implementing a formal enterprise architecture process to support the governance and management of IT. However, as noted in the opening paragraph of this article it ideally relates more broadly to the practice of business optimization in that it addresses business architecture, performance management and process architecture as well. Enterprise Architecture is also related to IT portfolio management and Metadata in the enterprise IT sense.

Enterprise architecture frameworks

Another open Enterprise Architecture Framework is the Extended Enterprise Architecture Framework (E2AF) from the Institute For Enterprise Architecture Developments. Extended Enterprise Architecture Framework.
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Architecture Framework (DoDAF)
EAP (Spewak)
Capgemini's Integrated Architecture Framework
United States Government Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA)
The UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) Architecture Framework (MODAF)
Treasury Enterprise Architecture Framework (TEAF)
The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF)
NIH Enterprise Architecture Framework

Zachman Framework
Zero Delta Framework ^*.

Certification of information, enterprise and IT architects

References

Carbone, J. A. (2004). IT architecture toolkit. Enterprise computing series. Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall PTR.
Cook, M. A. (1996). Building enterprise information architectures : reengineering information systems. Hewlett-Packard professional books. Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall.
Fowler, M. (2003). Patterns of enterprise application architecture. The Addison-Wesley signature series. Boston, Addison-Wesley.
Groot, Remco; Martin Smits, Halbe Kuipers, 2005. "A Method to Redesign the IS Portfolios in Large Organisations," Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'05) - Track 8 p. 223a (IEEE)
Spewak, S. H. and S. C. Hill (1993). Enterprise architecture planning : developing a blueprint for data, applications, and technology. Boston, QED Pub. Group.

More information

Training and Certification combined is the most effective way to create productive EA Practitioners. The FEAC Institute is tool neutral and Framework agnostic. It has available FEAF and DoDAF Executive, 3-Day, 5 Day workshops and has the premier Certification program consisting of 5 quarter courses the fifth being a practicum where the students build part of an EA, taught in mixed mode utilizing face to face instructions and an electronic classroom ^*

The information exchange area of the Institute For Enterprise Architecture Developments is delivering information about: EA standards, methods, tools, best practices, presentations, publications, certification, books, links, etc. More info about Enterprise Architecture

The US Government has mandated the use of a formal Enterprise Architecture process for all federal agencies with the Clinger-Cohen act of 1996.

Enterprise architecture can be seen as overly prescriptive and academic; agile approaches are proposed by some.

There are several ways of documenting and managing an architecture framework. Some of the most popular ones are Zachman Framework, The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and the Zero Delta Framework ^*.

Several Enterprise Architecture software tools exist to document and facilitate Enterprise Architects. More info about EA Tools

Integrated methods and software tools are available from Zero Delta ^*.

Organizational studies and human resource management | Information science | information technology management