Understand Enterprise Architecture

In the early days of computing, technology simply automated manual processes with greater efficiency. As technology evolved, new innovations enabled new capabilities and processes in the enterprise that were driven by IT. Gradually, IT changed the business but not necessarily in alignment with the business strategy. This lack of alignment resulted in significant waste of resources and missed opportunities, and placed the organization in a competitive disadvantage in the market.

To align the strategies of business with IT, a new approach for managing IT has been developed called Enterprise Architecture. Just as architecture provides a blueprint for constructing a building, Enterprise Architecture provides a blueprint and roadmap for aligning business strategy with IT.

The individual models in an EA are arranged in a logical manner, and this provides an ever-increasing level of detail about the enterprise, including the following:

• Its objectives and goals
• Its processes and organization
• Its systems and data
• The technology used

Effective Enterprise Architecture competencies foster business-IT Alignment by connecting business goals with technology to enable better planning of future IT investments and transformations.

These competencies enable the following:

• Drive corporate wide transformation and digitalization initiatives
• Enable strategic business goals using better operational excellence, more customer intimacy, greater product leadership or more strategic agility
• Maximize the ROI of customers Enterprise Architecture initiative to drive and support the successful business transformation by doing the following:
  • Promoting a business-outcome-driven enterprise architecture engagements
  • Operationalize innovations by taking IT strategy and existing investments into account
  • Support communication between different stakeholders from business and IT
  • Avoid the creation of IT systems that add further complexity to existing IT infrastructure
  • Document decisions for later reference (re-use) and follow-on projects

Key characteristics of enterprise architecture is to apply a holistic view across the organization, embracing business and IT along all functions, while also taking external factors into account. This is largely featured by defining and introducing a common language and vocabulary.

One important dimension in enterprise architecture is the dimension of time. To-be models will depict the envisioned future state while with the help of as-is models the gap between the current and future state can be assessed and translated into a roadmap.

Different artifacts will help to structure and visualize the enterprise architecture in various stages in time and alongside different architectural domains.

The term "architecture" is of a general nature and defines the abstract construction of a system - that is, a building, an organization, an IT-system, a machine, and so on.

An IT system has exactly one consistent architecture, which can be displayed in different views, or levels of detail for different purposes and stakeholders.

In the schematic figure above various viewpoints are depicted to visualize the components of an architecture and their relationship to different stakeholders. While business stakeholders might be interested in a process viewpoint, IT stakeholder might want to understand the scope of solution components, the interaction between these or how the solution components are physically deployed

Creating an Enterprise Architecture from scratch can be a daunting task, so EA frameworks were created to simplify the process and guide an architect through all areas of architecture development. An Enterprise Architecture framework provides a collection of best practices, standards, tools, processes, and templates to assist in the creation of the Enterprise Architecture and architectures of various scopes.

An architecture framework provides principles and practices for creating and using the architecture description of a system. It structures architects' thinking by dividing the architecture description into domains, layers, or views, and offers models - typically matrices and diagrams - for documenting each view. This allows for making systemic design decisions on all the components of the system and making long-term decisions around new design requirements, sustainability, and support.