Enterprise Architecture

A Pocket Guide

Tom Graves

• Publisher: ITGP
• Year: 2009
• Topic: Computer Science
• eBook ISBN:
  9781849281133
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Enterprise architecture makes a vital contribution to the running of a large organisation. It was originally developed in order to manage a rapid growth in the cost and complexity of IT systems, using knowledge gained from software structure and design. For this reason, enterprise architecture is often thought of as a component of IT governance. However, the discipline has evolved and extended its scope. Enterprise architecture is now about structuring business capabilities and processes in order to support your long-term business strategy. Effective application of enterprise architecture will enable you to improve your productivity and performance.

This pocket guide offers you an invaluable introduction to this business-critical subject. It explains the function of enterprise architecture within the organisation, looks at the skills needed within the enterprise architecture team and provides an overview of the most common enterprise architecture frameworks. As the author emphasises, enterprise architecture is not about creating models and designs for their own sake, but about using these structures to serve the needs of the business.

Benefits to business include:

• Make better decisions
  As a discipline, enterprise architecture helps companies to understand the way that their component systems (e.g. security, business continuity or performance management) all fit together. The pocket guide will show you how enterprise architecture can lead to better decision making
• Improve business effectiveness
  Enterprise architecture maintains a holistic view of the organisation, taking into account different issues, such as efficient use of resources and reliable delivery of services, and showing how they relate to one another. This pocket guide explains how to build up a comprehensive overview of the enterprise that can be used to assess the trade-offs involved across various domains and priorities. This will help you to improve your organisation's integration and effectiveness
• Improve your ability to manage risks
  Enterprise architecture has an important function in risk management, and can help your organisation to achieve compliance with regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and Basel II
• Improve your ability to manage change
  Every organisation is being forced to adapt as budgets grow tighter and new regulations are introduced. By enabling you to understand and map the interdependencies within your organisation, enterprise architecture makes it easier for you to work out the most effective solution.

Find out  how yo can make your organisation more than the sum of its parts.

CHAPTER 1:
WHAT IS ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE?

Some definitions

What is enterprise architecture, and why does it matter to business and to the governance¹ of business and IT?

The Practical Guide for the US Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework defines enterprise as:

‘…an organisation or cross-functional entity supporting a defined business scope or mission. [It] includes interdependent resources – people, organisations and technology – who must coordinate their functions and share information in support of a common mission or set of related missions.’²

Note that, as the same document also emphasises:

‘…in many cases, the enterprise may transcend established organisational boundaries – e.g. trade, grant management, financial management, logistics.’

A shared enterprise that extends beyond the organisation – as in a supply-chain or an industry consortium – may require more complex forms of governance, based on negotiation between partners rather than straightforward executive decisions.

The Practical Guide defines architecture as:

¹ See Chapter 3 for the specific meanings of ‘governance’ as used here.

² See http://www.gao.gov/special.pubs/eaguide.pdf

‘…the structure of components, their interrelationships, and the principles and guidelines governing their evolution and design.’

In effect, an ‘architecture’ in this context defines the content for a ‘knowledge base’ about structure, components, interrelationships and principles that are relevant to the needs of the enterprise.

Note that the Practical Guide definition above does not restrict ‘architecture’ to a predefined scope, such as software or IT. Despite the common assertion – such as in the TOGAF™³ specification – that enterprise architecture is a subset of IT governance, its scope could, and for consistency generally should, extend to the entire enterprise.⁴

Combining the definitions above, enterprise architecture is thus a discipline through which an enterprise can identify, develop and manage its knowledge of its purpose, its structure and itself. Some of that knowledge will be about IT, but it will also need to include many other concerns:

• business architecture

• organisational structure

• performance management

• business continuity/resilience planning

• process architecture

• security architecture

• data architecture

• applications architecture

• technology – infrastructure architecture.

3 TOGAF™ Version 9, Van Haren, 2009.

4 Tom Graves, Real Enterprise Architecture, Tetradian, 2008.

As a discipline, enterprise architecture provides a means to link together all of these differing ‘architectures’ and structural concerns.

Why enterprise architecture matters

The business purpose of the enterprise architecture body of knowledge is to provide decision support for direction and change at any level of the enterprise. Such decisions might include:

• executive – what the enterprise is and does, where it’s going, the choices in that journey

• programme and portfolio management – preferred technologies or process models for new developments

• operations planning – when to decommission an outdated legacy system

• resilience planning – alternative systems expected to be online by a specific date.

For example, the business questions enterprise architecture could be used to answer include:

• ‘What structures would we need to support this strategy?’

• ‘What constraints will our existing structures place on our strategic choices?’

• ‘What opportunities would be available to us with these innovations in our structures?’

• ‘How quickly could we align the systems of this newly-acquired company with our own?’

Within the upper levels of the organisation, decision support from enterprise architecture will simplify the ‘conversation’ between strategy – which sets enterprise direction – and an enterprise-wide programme management office (or equivalent) which implements the changes in capabilities and facilities required for each new strategy.

Enterprise architecture will also assist in managing changes imposed on the organisation from outside, by the market, by regulations, or – at an operations level – by system failures, environmental incidents or customer complaints. A more mature enterprise architecture will be able to map interdependencies across almost every aspect of the enterprise. This would aid resilience planning, for example, by identifying the probable impact that a server failure would have on key business-performance metrics; or compliance management, by indicating the manual and automated parts of processes that would be affected by new legislation.

A well-defined and well-maintained enterprise architecture is also proven to be a key factor in an organisation’s agility, effectiveness and ability to respond to risk, opportunity and change.⁵

⁵ Jeanne Ross, Peter Weill and David Robertson, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, Harvard Business School Press, 2006.

CHAPTER 2:
BUSINESS DRIVERS AND BENEFITS

Layers of business benefit

The business benefits of enterprise architecture typically arise in layers, linked in part to the maturity of architecture capability, ⁶ and to key business drivers that include:

• Cost management

• Compliance management

• Risk management

• Opportunity management.

Cost management: Even from the earliest stages of enterprise architecture, there will be an urgent need for it to assist in managing and reducing the cost and complexity of the organisation’s systems – particularly its IT systems. The aim here will be to reduce redundancy and duplication, to enhance consistency and common meaning across the enterprise, and to control and constrain the proliferation of unmanaged and undocumented ‘point solutions’.

Compliance management: Every enterprise faces an ever-increasing burden of conformity, such as:

• compliance to regulations: Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Basel II, anti-money-laundering, environment, health & safety, consumer...

Table of contents

• PREFACE
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE?
• CHAPTER 2: BUSINESS DRIVERS AND BENEFITS
• CHAPTER 3: ARCHITECTURE AND GOVERNANCE
• CHAPTER 4: ARCHITECTURE MATURITY
• CHAPTER 5: THE ARCHITECTURE TEAM
• CHAPTER 6: FRAMEWORKS, METHODS AND TOOLS
• CHAPTER 7: ARCHITECTURE IN PRACTICE
• ITG RESOURCES
• Newsletter