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Enterprise Architecture

Our extensive experience in Enterprise Architecture provides our clients the guidance to successfully implement the capability to maintain it on an ongoing basis. Enterprise Architecture is the formal organization (design or layout) of the components, structures and processes required for the attainment of the goals envisioned in an enterprise.

Enterprise Architecture is often used in the context of information systems applications in an enterprise; however, Enterprise Architecture is really concerned with all aspects of an enterprise with information technology as a sub-context.

Enterprise Architecture involves developing an architecture framework to describe a series of "current", "intermediate" and "target" reference architectures and applying them to align change within the enterprise. Another set of terms for these descriptive states are "as-is", "migration/roadmap" and "to-be".

These frameworks detail all relevant structures within the organization including business, applications, technology and data. 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 deliverable is a set of artifacts that describes in varying degrees of detail exactly what and how a business operates and what resources are required. These artifacts are often graphical and the levels of detail will vary according to affordability and other practical considerations.

Given these descriptions, IT executives can 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 answer such basic questions as:

• Is the current architecture supporting the organization and adding value?
• What architecture modifications can add more value to the organization?
• Based on what we know about what the organization wants to accomplish in the future, does the current architecture align with the business needs?

A value-based approach to implementing an enterprise architecture is recommended to realize quick wins, especially when the team is first being formed. Teams that spend too much time documenting the plan, without providing real value to the business executives, are at risk of being disbanded.

Implementing enterprise architecture generally starts with documenting the organization's strategy and goals. One part of this work is the company's operating model, which describes how the company delivers it’s goods and services to their markets.

The architecture process addresses documenting and understanding the discrete enterprise structural components, typically within the following four categories:

• Business:
• Strategy maps, goals, corporate policies, operating model
• Functional decompositions capabilities and organizational models
• Business processes
• Organization cycles, periods and timing
• Suppliers of hardware, software, and services
• Applications:
  • Application software inventories and diagrams
  • Interfaces between applications - that is: events, messages and data flows
  • Intranet, Extranet, Internet, eCommerce, EDI and B2B links with parties within and outside of the organization
  • Information:
  • Metadata
  • Data models: conceptual, logical, and physical
• Technology:
• Hardware, platforms, and hosting: servers, and where they are kept
• Local and wide area networks, Internet connectivity diagrams
• Operating System
• Infrastructure software: Application servers, DBMS
• Programming Languages, etc.
• Security across all of the Application, Information and Technology components, including policy, practices and technology

Wherever possible, all of the above should be related explicitly to the organization's strategy, goals, and operations for planning and decision-making needs. The enterprise architecture is most useful when documenting 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 tradeoffs and compromises vs. the ideal state.

An intermediate outcome of implementing an enterprise 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 tools to support decision making at all levels of the organization. It is key that the information remain current to be relevant and useful; a process must exist to keep the information "evergreen."

The organization must design and implement processes that facilitate progress from the current state to the future state, keeping the details current. Future state planning 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 infrastructure to address ever changing regulatory requirements, and other initiatives not driven explicitly by any single team in the organization's functional management.