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ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE
An Enterprise architecture (EA) is a rigorous description of the structure of an
enterprise, which comprises enterprise components (business entities), the
externally visible properties of those components, and the relationships (e.g.
the behavior) between them. EA describes the terminology, the composition of
enterprise components, and their relationships with the external environment,
and the guiding principles for the requirement (analysis), design, and evolution
of an Enterprise. This description is comprehensive, including enterprise goals,
business process, roles, organizational structures, organizational behaviors,
business information, software applications and computer systems.
Practitioners of EA call themselves enterprise architects. An enterprise
architect is a person responsible for developing the enterprise architecture and
is often called upon to draw conclusions from it. By producing an Enterprise
architecture, architects are providing a tool for identifying opportunities to
improve the enterprise, in a manner that more effectively and efficiently
pursues its purpose.
Scope The term enterprise is used because
it is generally applicable in many circumstances, including
Public or private sector organizations
An entire business or corporation
A part of a larger enterprise (such as a business unit)
A conglomerate of several organizations, such as a joint venture or partnership
A multiply outsourced business operation
The term enterprise includes the whole complex, socio-technical system,[3]
including:
1)
people
2)
information
3)
technology
4)
business (e.g. operations)
Defining the boundary or scope of the enterprise to be described is an important
first step in creating the Enterprise architecture. Enterprise as used in
enterprise architecture generally means more than the information systems
employed by an organization.
Methods and frameworks Enterprise architects use various business methods,
analytical techniques and conceptual tools to understand and document the
structure and dynamics of an enterprise. In doing so, they produce lists,
drawings, documents and models, together called artifacts. These artifacts
describe the logical organization of business functions, business capabilities,
business processes, people organization, information resources, business
systems, software applications, computing capabilities, information exchange and
communications infrastructure within the enterprise.
A collection of these artifacts, sufficiently complete to describe the
enterprise in useful ways, is considered by EA practitioners an 'enterprise'
level architectural description, or enterprise architecture, for short. The UK
National Computing Centre EA best practice states
Normally an EA takes the form of a comprehensive set of cohesive models that
describe the structure and functions of an enterprise.
The individual models in an EA are arranged in a logical manner that provides an
ever-increasing level of detail about the enterprise: its objectives and goals;
its processes and organization; its systems and data; the technology used and
any other relevant spheres of interest.
This is the definition of enterprise architecture implicit in several EA
frameworks including the popular TOGAF architectural framework.
An enterprise architecture framework bundles tools, techniques, artifact
descriptions, process models, reference models and guidance used by architects
in the production of enterprise-specific architectural description. A unified
architecture framework consists of a coherent set of integral modules to
collectively form a holistic discipline guiding the process of developing
solutions in an enterprise computing environment, as described in Solution
Architecting Mechanism (SAM).
siness architecture, information systems architecture and technology
architecture—and then subdivides the information systems architecture into
information architecture and applications architecture.
The Strategic Architecture model allows for a flexible division into up to ten
domains covering many aspects of an enterprise from its objectives and goals
through its projects and programs to its software applications and technology.
EA Domains: An Enterprise architecture’s landscape is usually divided into
various domains based on the attributes of the environment and the logical
grouping based on Industry EA Frameworks
The dividing of the practice into a number of domains allows enterprise
architects to describe an enterprise from a number of important perspectives.
This practice also encourages the contributions of many individuals and allows
the practice as a whole to make good use of individual domain-specific expertise
and knowledge. By taking this approach, enterprise architects can ensure a
holistic description is produced.
The popular and most common four domains and their component parts look like
this:
1. Business:
1.
1.Strategy maps, goals,
corporate policies, Operating Model
2.Functional
decompositions (e.g. IDEF0, SADT), business capabilities and organizational
models expressed as enterprise / line of business architecture
3.Business processes,
Workflow and Rules that articulate the assigned authorities, responsibilities
and policies
4.Organization cycles,
periods and timing
5.Suppliers of hardware,
software, and services
2. Information:
1.Information architecture - a holistic view on the flow of information in an
enterprise
2.Data Architecture- describes the way data will be processed, stored , data
flows and used by the projects teams that will use it
3.Master Data Management, is the authoritative, reliable foundation for data
used across many applications and business processes with the goal to provide a
single view of the truth no matter where the data is located
4.Metadata - data that describes your enterprise data elements
5.Business Intelligence Analytics & Reporting BI (Business Intelligence) is a
broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing,
analyzing, and providing access to data to help the organization users make
better business decisions. These include the activities of decision support
systems, query and reporting, dashboards , scorecards ,statistical analysis,
forecasting, and data mining. This includes Reporting Data Stores ( Operational
Data Store (ODS), Datamart and DataWarehouses)
6.Data Quality helps identify, analyze, improve, and measure the data quality
and data integrity issues and improvement efforts
7.Data models: conceptual expressed as enterprise information architectures,
logical, and physical
8.Data Life Cycle Management Processes to govern how to create, classify,
update, use, distribute, and archive, and obsolete data and information
Layers of the enterprise architecture.
Applications:
1.
1.Application software inventories and diagrams, expressed as conceptual /
functional or system enterprise / line of business architectures
2.Interfaces between applications - that is: events, messages
4. Technology:
1.
1.Inter-application mediating software or 'middleware'.
2.Application execution environments and operating frameworks including
applications server environments and operating systems, authentication and
authorisation environments, security systems and operating and monitoring
systems.
3.Hardware, platforms, and hosting: servers, datacentres and computer rooms
4.Local and wide area networks, Internet connectivity diagrams
5.Intranet, Extranet, Internet, eCommerce, EDI links with parties within and
outside of the organization
6.Operating System
7.Infrastructure software: Application servers, DBMS
8.Programming Languages, etc. expressed as enterprise / line of business
technology architecture.
Using an enterprise architecture
Describing the architecture of an enterprise aims primarily to improve the
effectiveness or efficiency of the business itself. This includes innovations in
the structure of an organization, the centralization or federation of business
processes, the quality and timeliness of business information, or ensuring that
money spent on information technology (IT) can be justified.
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