Enterprise Architecture is the process of planning, designing, and implementing the structure of an organization’s knowledge assets, information processes, and workflow, to support and align with its business goals and strategy. The underlying purpose is to ensure that business processes, their organization, and performance, is directly addressed by current and future information technology, including hardware systems, application software, and data storage mechanisms.

By creating a highly-detailed and rigorous taxonomy of key terminology, and ontology on contextual rules, the business strategy is traceable down to the underlying technology used to implement it. In particular, the current state and future business goals are explicitly defined so that a migration plan can be evaluated, and the investment value of changing the existing infrastructure can be accurately assessed by decision makers.

Four distinct components must be taken into consideration:

1. The current business processes, the operating model, policies, goals, and strategy.
2. The communication and information flow between entities inside and outside the organization, and the applications that support it.
3. The logical and conceptual structure of the information, and the metadata system used to track and maintain it.
4. The physical hardware and other necessary mechanical platforms needed to house it.

The articulation of an Enterprise Architecture is an ongoing dynamic process maintained in a reference library as articles — both written and graphic. The difficult of concretely expressing the strategic, managerial, and operational goals of an organization in terms that reflect the high-level low detail organizational concepts as well as the low-level but highly detailed functional aspects, is the overarching challenge.

The larger the organization, the greater is the need for a clear methodology for governance. The development and an enterprise architecture helps insure that complex departmental decisions are inline with information systems technology, interoperability is maximized, and changes are facilitated efficiently.

Tags: business process management, enterprise architecture