Portal:EnterpriseArchitecture

The content of the ESA can be viewed from many perspectives and it needs to satisfy many needs. Actors include business analysts, solution architects, workflow analysts, organisational governance teams, and so on. These require all levels of data from high-level summary information to the low level details. An enterprise architecture creates a number of views: conceptual, logical, and physical.

Typically all frameworks look from three general architectural perspectives.

1. Business Architecture
2. Information Systems (IS) Architecture (can be split into Data Architecture and Applications Architecture)
3. Technical Architecture

EA and the Business

The Business Goals are executed by the Business Strategy which is itself realised by the Business Architecture and drives the Information Systems (IS) Architecture. Architectural Principles are derived from the IS Architecture and these along with the Business Architecture leads to the Technical Architecture.

EA and the IT Group

Often a barrier is created between the people developing the Architecture and those who are impacted by the Architecture. Often the Enterprise Architecture practice is seen as an Ivory Tower or an architecture that is created and handed down with limited participation.

People generally don't like to be told what to do and often will look for backdoors to bypass the new. One of the key parts to Enterprise Architecture is to communicate and educate the IT group. This needs to be done whilst the architecture is being created and not left until the end. People need to feel as though they are participating and opinions are valued.

Whatever the process or framework you adopt it will fail unless you handle the organisation, awareness and education issues.

Some common IT problems due to a lack of an Enterprise Architecture practice

IT Reactive

IT is driven by business problems with no sight of the Business Strategy.

Information Integrity

The Information held within IT systems does not map to the businesses view of this information. Can often be as a result of different views of the same information.

Security

IT systems don't provide the level of security required. Often information hosted within old technology is now exposed to the Internet.

Tactical Infrastructure

Infrastructure built over many years in a silo fashion is now costly to maintain and hard to replace. This may be due to duplicate system functionality and also incompatible technologies.

Maintenance Costs

True maintenance costs are unkown but also can be as much as 80% of the IT budget.

Managability

Can't take a proactive approach. Often due to many of the other problems mentioned arround technologies and duplication.

IT Organisation

Often the IT organisation does not want to change and key individuals feel safe in "keeping to the way they always have done it". On the otherside of the coin new people with a drive to change don't understand some of the old technologies.

Partners

Yes, partners are supposed to help but they can only be managed through very tight governance.

Purchasing

Projects drive purchasing with no architectural direction. This results in a rapid increase in different technologies.

IT can't keep up

IT is always behind a fast changing business and seen as a delay and not an enabler of change.