In the interview with the chairman and CEO of Xerox Corporation, Paul Allaire recounted having led the company through a fundamental redesign and transformation known as the “organizational architecture” by redefining the three key components: hardware, people and software.
In this blog, as Senior Enterprise Architect at CBC / Radio-Canada and TOGAF Certified, I would like humbly to contribute to the definition of the role and boundaries of the Enterprise Architecture within an organization.
A Google search on this topic brings up many blogs, which either define this architecture discipline in contradictory way or acknowledge that there is a lack of agreement across the industry.
Enterprise Architecture, IT Strategy and IT Governance are buzzwords that can be hard to separate from each other. Most companies have different perceptions of what to include under each term.
Within a company, if we compare the focus of the architecture activities (tactical vs strategic) and their scope (enterprise-wide or locally-oriented) as outlined in the following picture, we can distinguish four types of architecture.
The Enterprise Architecture (EA) was born in the mid-eighties mainly to address two critical problems:
- System complexity: Organizations were spending more and more money building IT systems; and
- Poor business alignment: Organizations were finding it more and more difficult to keep those increasingly expensive IT systems aligned with business need.
Although these problems were identified thirty years ago, they are nowadays actual, even they reached the highest crisis point.
The Enterprise Architecture identifies all the main components of an organization; the information systems supporting the business processes. Enterprise Architecture is a complete expression of the enterprise; a master plan which “acts as a collaboration force” between aspects of business planning such as goals, visions, strategies and governance principles.
The Enterprise Architecture encompasses at least four types of architecture disciplines: business architecture, data architecture, application architecture and technology architecture as outlined by the following picture.
Many enterprise-architectural methodologies have come and gone in the last 30 years. At this point, almost 90 percent of the field use one of these four methodologies:
- The Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) - viewed as either an implemented enterprise architecture or a proscriptive methodology for creating an enterprise architecture
The Enterprise Architect is a key player within an organization to ensure the optimum of the business processes execution and to drive the delivery of the business outcomes.
The Enterprise Architects are facing the challenges to ensure that more complex solutions and components are aligned at strategic and implementation levels. They must coordinate guidance to solution delivery with application architecture as shown in this picture.
The intersections between EA and other architecture disciplines must accommodate different focus areas and concerns to ensure consistency across enterprise-wide strategic objectives and business-specific decisions. Bottom line, Enterprise and other architects must coordinate closely for the benefit of the company they are serving.
Yours,
