1.1 Part 2: Enterprise Architecture Concepts

Prelim Topic

Enterprise Architecture (EA)

• Is a comprehensive operational framework that explores all of an organization’s functional areas while defining how technology benefits and serves the organization’s overall mission.

• The technological aspect of this concept defines the hardware, operating systems, programming, and networking solutions a business employs and how those may be used to achieve its current and future objectives

• Includes the following components: Mission, stakeholders and customers, processes, applications and infrastructure, networks, and data.

Enterprise Architecture (EA)

• It facilitates the improvement of processes by discovering business processes that require a change,

• Efficiently and continuously managing change via clearly defined documentation,

• Developing and implementing enterprise-wide procedures,

• Encouraging effective enterprise-wide communication, which, in theory, leads to better decisions.

Business Architecture

• How a business operates, like how important business processes do what they do by using the appropriate capabilities and the right information in the context of the organization.

• It models other things like roles and responsibilities, metrics, products, projects, and so on.

• By modeling the business using architecture, one of the things we can figure out is how information technology supports the business

Application Architecture

• Defines the software solutions that help businesses do their job and adapt to change.

Data Architecture

• As your enterprise data gets more complex and you want to capture a lot more information about your customers, their interactions with your company, their preferences, your products and prices, etc., you need a better way to manage and use this data which is probably stored in different formats like documents, spreadsheets, databases, emails, and more.

• Modeling the sources, the format, management, quality and whole lot more. Many companies today work with petabytes of data.

Technology Infrastructure

• Describes the underlying infrastructure ultimately needed to run the business applications

• We need physical machines, wires, routers, storage and software to go with all these to support other types of architecture.

Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA)

• Is intended to provide a common framework for the cost-effective sharing of data across different organizational units taking care of the security and privacy of the specific information.

• Describes the set of requirements, principles, and models - the current state, future state, and guidance necessary to flexibly share and exchange information assets to achieve effective enterprise change.

• Identify the few most efficient means of connecting users with the information they need most.