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Enterprise architecture (EA) is "a well-defined practice for conducting enterprise analysis, design, planning, and implementation, using a holistic approach at all times, for the successful development and execution of strategy. Enterprise architecture applies architecture principles and practices to guide organizations through the business, information, process, and technology changes necessary to execute their strategies. These practices utilize the various aspects of an enterprise to identify, motivate, and achieve these changes."

Practitioners of EA call themselves enterprise architects. An enterprise architect is a person responsible for performing this complex analysis of business structure and processes and is often called upon to draw conclusions from the information collected. By producing this understanding, architects are attempting to address the goals of EA: Effectiveness, Efficiency, Agility, and Durability.

Definitions

The MIT Center for Information Systems Research (MIT CISR) in 2007 defined enterprise architecture as the specific aspects of a business that are under examination:

Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the company's operating model. The operating model is the desired state of business process integration and business process standardization for delivering goods and services to customers.

The Enterprise Architecture Research Forum defines enterprise architecture as

the continuous practice of describing the essential elements of a socio-technical organisation, their relationships to each other and to the environment, in order to understand complexity and manage change.

Gartner, a leading IT analysis firm, defines the term as a discipline where an enterprise is led through change. According to their glossary,

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a discipline for proactively and holistically leading enterprise responses to disruptive forces by identifying and analyzing the execution of change toward desired business vision and outcomes. EA delivers value by presenting business and IT leaders with signature-ready recommendations for adjusting policies and projects to achieve target business outcomes that capitalize on relevant business disruptions. EA is used to steer decision making toward the evolution of the future state architecture.

Each of the definitions above underplay the historical reality that enterprise architecture emerged from methods for documenting and planning information systems architectures, and the current reality that most enterprise architecture practitioners report to a CIO or other IT department manager. In a business organization structure today, the enterprise architecture team performs an ongoing business function that helps business and IT managers to figure out the best strategies to support and enable business development and business change – in relation to the business information systems the business depends on.

Enterprise architecture topics

Meanings of enterprise architecture

In the EA literature and community, it is possible to distinguish various perspectives with regards to the meaning of the term “enterprise architecture”. As of yet, no official definition exists; rather, various organizations (public and private) promote their understanding of the term. Consequently, the EA literature offers many definitions for the term enterprise architecture; some of which are complementary, others nuances, and others yet are in opposition. Current perspectives, or beliefs, held by enterprise architecture practitioners and scholars, with regards to the meaning of the enterprise architecture, typically gravitates towards one or a hybrid of three schools of thought:

Enterprise IT architecting – According to this school, the purpose of EA is the greater alignment between IT and business concerns. The main purpose of EA is to guide the process of planning and design the IT/IS capabilities of an enterprise in order to meet desired organizational objectives. Typically, architecture proposals and decisions are limited to the IT/IS aspects of the enterprise; other aspects only serve as inputs.

Enterprise integrating – According to this school, the purpose of EA is to achieve greater coherency between the various concerns of an enterprise (HR, IT, Operations, etc.) including the linking between strategy formulation and execution. Typically, architecture proposals and decisions encompass all the aspects of the enterprise.

Enterprise ecological adaptation – According to this school, the purpose of EA is to foster and maintain the learning capabilities of enterprises so that they may be sustainable. Consequently, a great deal of emphasis is put on improving the capabilities of the enterprise to improve itself, to innovate and to coevolve with its environment. Typically, proposals and decisions encompass both the enterprise and its environment.

One’s belief with regards to the meaning of enterprise architecture will impact greatly how one sees the purpose of EA, the scope of EA, the means of achieving EA, the skills needed to conduct EA, and the locus of responsibility for conducting EA

Scope

The term enterprise covers all kinds of business organization, public or private, large or small, 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 multiple outsourced business operation
• Many collaborating public and/or private organizations in multiple countries

The term enterprise includes the whole complex, socio-technical system, including people, information, processes and technologies.

The term architecture refers to a high-level or abstract description of the enterprise as a system – its boundary, the products and services it provides, and its internal structures and behaviors, both human and technical. It is assumed that designers, developers or engineers will complete the most detailed and concrete descriptions of specific enterprise systems, and the architect will retain responsibility for governing that lower level work.

Architectural description of an enterprise

According to the international standard ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010, the work product used to describe the architecture of a system is called an architectural description. In practice, an architectural description contains a variety of lists, tables and diagrams. These are models known as views. In the case of Enterprise Architecture, these models describe the logical business functions or capabilities, business processes, human roles and actors, the physical organization structure, data flows and data stores, business applications and platform applications, hardware and communications infrastructure.

The UK National Computing Centre EA best practice guidance 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.

The architecture of an enterprise is described with a view to improving the manageability, effectiveness, efficiency or agility of the business, and ensuring that money spent on information technology (IT) is justified.

Paramount to changing the enterprise architecture is the identification of a sponsor, his/her mission, vision and strategy and the governance framework to define all roles, responsibilities and relationships involved in the anticipated transformation. Changes considered by enterprise architects typically include:

• innovations in the structure or processes of an organization
• innovations in the use of information systems or technologies
• the integration and/or standardization of business processes,
• improving the quality and timeliness of business information.

A methodology for developing and using architecture to guide the transformation of a business from a baseline state to a target state, sometimes through several transition states, is usually known as an enterprise architecture framework. A framework provides a structured collection of processes, techniques, artifact descriptions, reference models and guidance for the production and use of an enterprise-specific architecture description. See the related articles Enterprise Architecture framework and architecture domain for further information.

Benefits of enterprise architecture

As new technologies arise and are implemented, the benefits of enterprise architecture continue to grow. Enterprise architecture defines what an organization does; who performs individual functions within the organization, and within the market value chain; how the organizational functions are performed; and how information are used and stored. IT costs are reduced and responsiveness with IT systems is improved. However, to be successful, continual development and periodic maintenance of the enterprise architecture is essential. Building an enterprise architecture could take considerable time and proper planning is essential, including phasing the project in slowly, prior to implementation. If the enterprise architecture is not kept up to date, the aforementioned benefits will become useless.

Actually in United States enterprises like: MIT, Yale and Squ give scholarships to projects with functional designs. MIT accepts designs here: kks@info.mit Squ: scholarships@squenterprise.com and Yale directly in offices on the Yale School.

Examples of enterprise architecture use

Documenting the architecture of enterprises is done within the U.S. Federal Government in the context of the Capital Planning and Investment Control (CPIC) process.

The Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) reference models guides federal agencies in the development of their architectures.

Companies such as Independence Blue Cross, Intel, Volkswagen AG and InterContinental Hotels Group use enterprise architecture to improve their business architectures as well as to improve business performance and productivity.

For various understandable reasons, commercial organizations rarely publish substantial enterprise architecture descriptions. However, government agencies have begun to publish architectural descriptions they have developed. Examples include

• US Department of the Interior,
• US Department of Defense Business Enterprise Architecture, or the 2008 BEAv5.0 version.
• Treasury Enterprise Architecture Framework

Relationship to other disciplines

Enterprise architecture is a key component of the information technology governance process in many organizations, which have implemented a formal enterprise architecture process as part of their IT management strategy. While this may imply that enterprise architecture is closely tied to IT, it should be viewed in the broader context of business optimization in that it addresses business architecture, performance management and process architecture as well as more technical subjects. Depending on the organization, enterprise architecture teams may also be responsible for some aspects of performance engineering, IT portfolio management and metadata management. Recently, protagonists like Gartner and Forrester have stressed the important relationship of Enterprise Architecture with emerging holistic design practices such as Design Thinking and User Experience Design. Analyst firm Real Story Group suggested that Enterprise Architecture and the emerging concept of the Digital workplace were "two sides to the same coin."

The following image from the 2006 FEA Practice Guidance of US OMB sheds light on the relationship between enterprise architecture and segment (BPR) or Solution architectures.

Relationship between enterprise architecture and service-oriented architecture

When considering the relationship between EA and SOA, there are a number of issues to consider. Not the least of these is what the enterprise understands EA and SOA to mean. Some guidelines can be found at this reference:

Notable enterprise architecture tools

The following table lists the most notable enterprise architecture tools as recognized by Gartner and Forrester Research in their most recent reports.

Criticism

Despite the benefits that Enterprise Architecture claims to provide, for more than a decade a number of industry leaders, writers, and leading organizations have raised concerns about Enterprise Architecture as an effective practice. Here is a partial list:

• In 2007 noted computer scientist Ivar Jacobson (a major contributor to UML and pioneer in OO software development) gave his assessment of EA: "Around the world introducing an Enterprise Architecture EA has been an initiative for most financial institutions (banks, insurance companies, government, etc.) for the last five years or so, and it is not over. I have been working with such companies and helped some of them to avoid making the worst mistakes. Most EA initiatives failed. My guess is that more than 90% never really resulted in anything useful."

• In a 2007 report on EA, Gartner predicted that "... by 2012 40% of enterprise architecture programs will be stopped."

• A 2008 study by performed by Erasmus University Rotterdam and software company IDS Scheer concluded that two-thirds of EA projects failed to improve business and IT alignment.

• In a 2009 article, industry commentator Dion Hinchcliffe wrote that traditional EA might be "broken": "At its very best, enterprise architecture provides the bright lines that articulate the full range of possibilities for a business, even describing how to go about getting there. ... Recently there’s a growing realization that traditional enterprise architecture as it’s often practiced today might be broken in some important way. What might be wrong and how to fix it are the questions du jour."

• In 2011 federal EA consultant Stanley Gaver released a report that examined problems within the United States federal government’s EA program. Mr. Gaver concluded that the federal EA program had mostly failed; this conclusion was corroborated by a similar one made by the federal government at an October 2010 meeting that was held to determine why the federal EA program was not “as influential and successful as in the past.”

See also

Template:Misplaced Pages books

• Architectural pattern (computer science)
• Enterprise Architect
• Enterprise Architecture Assessment Framework
• Enterprise Architecture framework
• Enterprise Architecture Planning
• Enterprise engineering
• Enterprise Life Cycle
• Enterprise Unified Process
• Federation of Enterprise Architecture Professional Organizations
• Global Information Network Architecture
• History of Enterprise Architecture
• Information Architecture
• Information Framework
• John Zachman

References

1. Federation of EA Professional Organizations, Common Perspectives on Enterprise Architecture, Architecture and Governance Magazine, Issue 9-4, November 2013 (2013). Retrieved on 2013-11-19.
2. Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture Foundation, PEAF Foundation - Vision
3. MIT Center for Information Systems Research, Peter Weill, Director, as presented at the Sixth e-Business Conference, Barcelona Spain, 27 March 2007,
4. Van der Merwe, Alta; Gerber, Aurona; Kotze, Paula; Van der Merwe, Paul; Mentz, Jan; Labuschagne, Louw; Gilliland, Sonja; Joubert, Pieter (2009) Enterprise Architecture Definition, Submitted to the Open Group; Available at http://www.altavandermerwe.com/resources/EARF%20Definition.pdf EARF Enterprise Architecture Definition
5. Gartner IT Glossary – Enterprise Architecture (EA). Gartner.com. Retrieved on 2013-07-29.
6. Mentz, J, Van der Merwe, Alta, & Kotze, Paula. (2012) "A Comparison of Practitioner and Researcher Definitions of Enterprise Architecture using an Interpretation Method". In: Advances in Enterprise Information Systems II, C. Møller & S. Chaudhry eds., CRC Press, p. 11-26
7. ^ Lapalme, J., Three Schools of Thought on Enterprise Architecture, IT Professional, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 37–43, Nov.–Dec. 2012, doi:10.1109/MITP.2011.109
8. Giachetti, R.E., Design of Enterprise Systems, Theory, Architecture, and Methods, CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 2010.
9. "ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2011 – Systems and software engineering – Architecture description". Iso.org. 2011-11-24. Retrieved 2013-11-17.
10. Jarvis, Bob (2003) Enterprise Architecture: Understanding the Bigger Picture – A Best Practice Guide for Decision Makers in IT, The UK National Computing Centre, Manchester, UK. p. 9
11. Federal Government agency success stories, (2010), whitehouse.gov
12. FEA Practice Guidance Federal Enterprise Architecture Program Management Office OMB, (2007), whitehouse.gov
13. "Volkswagen of America: Managing IT Priorities," Harvard Business Review, October 5, 2005, Robert D. Austin, Warren Ritchie, Greggory Garrett
14. ihg.com
15. DoD BEA
16. Clay Richardson, Forrester Blogs – Design Thinking Reshapes EA For Dynamic Business, (2013)
17. Joe McKendrick, ZDNet – Gartner urges more 'design thinking' to break enterprise architecture out of its silo, (2010)
18. Leslie Owens, Forrester Blogs – Who Owns Information Architecture? All Of Us., (2010), blogs.forrester.com
19. Tony Byrne, Real Story Group Blog – Digital workplace and enterprise architecture: two sides to same coin, (2012),
20. Christopher Kistasamy, Alta van der Merwe, Andre de la Harpe, (2012), The role of service oriented architecture as an enabler for Enterprise Architecture, AMCIS 2012, Seattle Washington
21. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools, 2013
22. Forrester Wave EA Management Suites, Q2 2013
23. EA Failed Big Way! by Ivar Jacobson. on http://blog.ivarjacobson.com/ October 18, 2007.
24. Gartner (2007) Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit: Architecting the Agile Organization, 26 – 27 September 2007. Overview on www.gartner.com. Accessed November 18, 2013.
25. S. Roeleven, Sven and J. Broer (2010). "Why Two Thirds of Enterprise Architecture Projects Fail," ARIS Expert Paper (online)
26. Fixing Enterprise Architecture: Balancing the Forces of Change in the Modern Organization Dion Hinchcliffe, 3 September 2009
27. "Why Doesn't the FEA Work" 6 September 2012, summarized in Semantic Community

External links

• Media related to Enterprise architecture at Wikimedia Commons
• Quotations related to Enterprise architecture at Wikiquote
• The dictionary definition of enterprise architecture at Wiktionary

• Misplaced Pages articles containing buzzwords from February 2013
• Human resource management
• Information science
• Design
• Enterprise architecture