<p>about your learning experience to help us improve.</p>

You've completed

cleanFiles/SL_EA100_Discovering_the_EA_Portfolio_en-US_learning-sap-com_lsc-prod.zip (MMCP-DROPZONE) - 2025-03-19T15:22:54.000Z

Understanding the Principles of Architecture

<div id="content"><p tabindex="0">Enterprise Architecture principles serve as guardrails, guiding architecture decisions, and communication. Sound principles follow three steps:</p><ol><li tabindex="0">Define the principles</li><li tabindex="0">Understand the rationale</li><li tabindex="0">Identify the impact</li></ol><div class="kalturaVideoLessonWrapper"><div aria-label="" class="kalturaVideoLessonContainer" data-testid="video" id="1_tlphqrap"></div></div><div class="parentsection"><div class="section"><div tabindex="0"><h3>Key Points to Remember</h3></div><p tabindex="0">Architecture principles are essential guidelines that shape the structure and function of your architecture. These principles can apply broadly across the entire enterprise or be specific to individual projects. They act as foundational rules to guide the development of your architecture and define what a good solution should look like.</p><div tabindex="0"><h3>Steps to Create Architecture Principles:</h3></div><div class="formalblock"><dl><dt>1. Define the Principles</dt><dd><p tabindex="0">Begin by determining the specific standards, vendors, and deployment options that align with your corporate strategy or market requirements. This step is vital and typically involves workshops with key IT and business stakeholders.</p></dd><dt>2. Understand the Rationale</dt><dd>It’s crucial for everyone in the organization to understand the value of adhering to these principles. This understanding, known as the rationale, ensures that the principles are embraced and applied effectively.</dd><dt>3. Identify the Impact</dt><dd>Consider the concrete effects that each principle will have on your architecture. These are the implications that will guide how the principles influence decisions and designs.</dd></dl></div><div tabindex="0"><h3>Benefits of Architecture Principles:</h3></div><div class="formalblock"><dl><dt>1. Ensure Consistency and Coherence</dt><dd>Architecture principles help align decisions with business goals, promoting uniformity across all projects.</dd><dt>2. Manage Complexity</dt><dd>By providing clear guidelines, these principles simplify systems, making them easier to understand, maintain, and scale. Without these constraints, there’s a risk of creating a fragmented IT landscape.</dd><dt>3. Facilitate Communication</dt><dd>Serving as a common language, these principles enhance collaboration among diverse teams. It’s crucial that they are communicated effectively across the entire organization.</dd><dt>4. Guide Decision-Making</dt><dd>Architecture principles offer a framework for evaluating options, ensuring that both business and technical needs are met.</dd></dl></div></div></div></div>

Architecture Principles

Discovering SAP Enterprise Architecture

<div><div><div><div><div><div>Explore the significance of enterprise architecture principles, their structure, and benefits. Learn how to create and implement effective architecture principles for organizational success.<br><br># This description was auto-generated #</div></div></div></div></div></div>

Architecture Principles_new.mp4

In this e-learning, we will understand the value of enterprise architecture principles and also how we structure and develop these. So after that, you will have an understanding what an architecture principle is about, how to create a principle and how to structure these principles in terms of an architecture principle catalog. Let's have an overview and understand the benefits of architecture principles. First of all, the purpose of the architecture principles are to serve and provide guardrails to the organization in order to ensure that everyone is moving in the right direction in terms of architecture development. Therefore, architecture principles also can act as constraints in which the architecture must deal with. So if we look now from the benefits point of view, first of all, we said it's providing guardrails And these guardrails also help to take architecture decisions over time. And principals themselves should feature the goals and the objectives which we have actually detailed out in the business strategy map. Another benefit is around the communication. So they serve as a common language as an orientation. They are normally shared with project teams and everyone knows in which direction we actually want to move. And they will support the decision-making. So options, solution options, for example, they will be rated against the principles in order to see if a specific solution or proposal is meeting the principle or not. That could be both from business and also from technical side. If we now look into the principle as such, there are three steps to come up with sound principles. One is we have first to define a principle statement. So also first the name, so a kind of a remember name that everyone knows it during the night. Let's say if someone is getting a wake up and also a sound description of what this principle is all about. Then the next step is to understand the rationale. So the why, why are we putting this principle in place and how does this principle help to reach our business goals? And then the last part is the identification of the implication. This is very important because here we define what needs to be done more and what should maybe not be done anymore. So rather than a constraint. And this actually brings then the principle in a way that, for example, architects, solution architects, which have to architect against this principle and also enterprise architects have an orientation and understand the implication of what needs to be done and what needs not to be done. So that's very important if you want to define a very sound and crisp enterprise architecture principle. So let's have a know. The following slide gives you an example of how an enterprise architecture principle could look like. So we have taken this one from Turgow out of the version 10, the so-called ease of use principle and this is about the usability of applications that users should not be exposed to any technology so that they can easily work and effectively work with applications. The rationale is here that users should be productive for example and you also see in the implications that a common look and feel is required across different applications in order to feature this principle. So that is one example how a architecture principle could look like If you are interested in more what is also coming from TOGAF, please visit the TOGAF version 10, the link we have also included here in the slide. You see here this is a quite extensive catalogue of principles. You see it's also structured around different architecture domains like business, application information, integration, and so on and so forth. and then within you find here the respective principles which have been detailed out. There should then also be the respective rational and also the implication. If you now want to come up with your own principle, you can use this template here, which also gives you some insights what should be the specific part be about, so the name and the statement. You see here the rational and also the implication. And this is something we have gotten from Tugaf version 10. The principle definition is now around since quite a while. So you can also go back here to the Tugaf source. There are also good examples in there, maybe a bit more from generic enterprise architecture perspective, but certainly also a good starting point if you are in a customer engagement.