Enterprise Architecture: Here’s What You Should Know
Enterprise architecture (EA) helps to align business and IT by mapping applications, technology, and data to the value streams and business processes they support. It establishes business capabilities and interdependencies in relation to corporate strategy, bridging the gap between concept generation and implementation.
A successful enterprise architecture tool serves as a blueprint for business and operational models, identifies risks and opportunities, and allows for the development of technological roadmaps. Simply defined, EA facilitates IT and business transformation by assisting technology and business innovation leaders in focusing on effective, value-driven results.
What is Enterprise Architecture?
Enterprise architecture defines and records an organization’s structure and operations in order to determine how best to fulfill its goals. It converts enterprise goals into IT capabilities via analysis, planning, design, and execution. Improved decision-making, the capacity to react to changing market conditions, the elimination of wasteful or duplicate procedures, and the optimization of people, processes, and technology are all benefits of an EA approach.
The Importance of an Enterprise Architecture Framework
Due to fast digital change and developing technologies, EA has become increasingly relevant to the whole company, in addition to its traditional responsibility of IT oversight. According to Gartner, EA is becoming a “kind of internal management consulting” since it offers management relevant, timely insights needed to make choices.
Basic visualization tools and spreadsheets have been utilized, but these are restricted and generic solutions that impede the cooperation necessary to deliberately and constantly measure and maintain models, frameworks, and concepts as they change. As a result, when technology is used to centrally document and display EA artifacts for improved decision-making, enterprise architecture management becomes more strategic and impactful.
Purpose of Enterprise architecture
The goal of enterprise architecture is to build a map of IT assets and business processes, as well as a set of governance rules, to drive a continuous dialogue about business strategy and how it may be articulated through IT. As will be described later, there are several recommended frameworks for developing an enterprise architecture. However, most frameworks have four basic domains, which are as follows:
- Business architecture: paperwork outlining the most essential business operations of a corporation. BPMN provides a common tactic for an industry collective’s business processes; it simplifies the interchange of processes between firms;
- Information architecture: defines where essential information blocks, such as a customer record, are stored and how they are frequently accessed.
- Application system architecture: a diagram depicting the interdependence of software applications; and
- Infrastructure technology architecture: a plan for hardware, storage systems, and networks. According to industry practitioners, business architecture is the most important, but also the most hardest to implement.
Conclusion:
Finally, every business architecture must be viewed (planned, produced, and internally marketed) as a deliverable product, something that can be used, rather than an abstract notion. In the context of I.T, and architecture must be seen by users and stakeholders. It must contain inputs, outputs, functionality, built-in data, and so on. It is difficult to view a basic conception as bringing value. If the enterprise architecture is viewed as a collection of “blueprint instructions on how to construct things, notably illustrating the interaction of one IT entity with another,” then the architecture should be perceived by the business world.