What is Enterprise Architecture?
Enterprise Architecture is a descriptive, visual representation of the operations and resources of an organization. Enterprise Architecture describes, diagrams, and analyzes a business in terms of its strategic objectives, processes and procedures, technical infrastructure, human resources, internal controls and risks, and the connections among all of these. It provides a common understanding of the organization.
Why is Enterprise Architecture important to businesses?
Enterprise Architecture provides critical information for better decision making and resource allocation, and as a result, enables improved productivity, higher levels of customer satisfaction and retention, and significant cost savings. Enterprise Architecture optimally aligns business strategy with operational processes and IT investments.
What are the business goals of Enterprise Architecture?
Enterprise Architecture helps organizations understand, align, and control information at the enterprise level, anticipate trends, manage changes in their markets, and reduce unknowns, delays, and costs. The objective of Enterprise Architecture is to provide visibility into the organization’s operations for more informed decision-making.
How does Enterprise Architecture work?
Through a structured, iterative process, using tools and methods provided by specialized Enterprise Architecture software, descriptions and visual diagrams of the organization’s business processes and resources are collected and stored in a central enterprise repository, offering shared access to common information and the ability to instantly and universally update facts. Through this collective view of the organization, gaps in services, redundancies, and risks can be identified and controlled, and predictive “what if” modeling can show the potential effects of operational changes before they are made.
What is the required technology for a successful Enterprise Architecture program?
A consistent approach, broad utilization of the same tool, and impact analysis are essential. The technology should:
- describe and display through diagrams every aspect of the enterprise’s architecture – business processes, IT systems and the business functions they support, risks involved in data flow through the processes, how processes and systems relate to business goals and strategies, and more – and relate them to each other.
- support multiple people sharing the same, single definition of an item (i.e. process, application, invoice, purchase order) to ensure accurate impact analysis. This is best provided through an object-oriented repository.
- provide strong, easy-to-use output generation capabilities that allow business users in multiple departments to easily share information beyond the community of IT staff who collect and develop data for the repository.
- structure work in the repository by projects, deliverables, and methods to align with how businesses actually conduct project management.
Enterprise Architecture promotes a consistent vision, shared by all. This is essential to manage today’s business complexity. Because, after all, you can’t change what you can’t see.
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