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| DescriptionThe
From
this an “Enterprise Architecture” would be the method, art, or practice of
designing organizations. As
an organization is a formal framework for communications that is composed of determined
by three major factors; complexity, formalization and centralization which
establish the rules for the different objects (job classifications, reporting
relationships, functional departments and physical work locations that must be
related to many components. Some of these are the
business processes, the information those processes use or manage, the
technology and human infrastructure, the strategies used to deploy these
capabilities, and their impact on business functions. All comprise elements that
must be described through the architecture products
that describe the enterprise
and to therefore ensure the all aspects of the organization (people, systems,
technology, etc.) align with its objectives and strategy. A
fuller definition of “Enterprise Architecture would therefore comprise the
specification of the strategic
information asset base, the mission, the information necessary to perform the
mission, the technologies necessary to perform the mission, and the transitional
processes for implementing new technologies in response to the changing mission
needs. To
be useful,
an Enterprise Architecture, must provide a rigorously constructed drawing of the
target enterprise based on a well-defined set of notations
and rules that ensures that the
resulting product is predictable, repeatable, describes all aspects of interest
in an enterprise and can be unambiguously evaluated by anyone who understand the
notation. Such a description is much
more then an organization chart, although such a picture might be an element of
the description of an organization’s architecture. An
Enterprise Architecture is distinct from an Enterprise Information Technology
Architecture. This latter
architecture addresses the principles, guidelines, drawings, standards and rules
that guide the enterprise’s acquisition, construction, maintenance and
interfacing of computer hardware, software, communications protocols,
development methods, database systems, modeling tools, IT organizational
structures, data and related resources throughout the enterprise. Further
reduction in the level of abstraction would be addressed through the System
Architecture as this refers to the architecture of a specific construction or
system. This
architecture would be the
result of a design process for a specific system and specify the functions of
components, their interfaces, their interactions, and
their constraints.
It is also distinct from a Software Architecture. The software
architecture of a program or computing system is the structure or structures of
the system, which comprise software components. For
each of these types of architectures the main concern is the externally visible
properties of the components of the domain (Enterprise, Information Technology,
System, Software), and the relationships among them;
each will therefore require a different type of formalism to describe the
components and relationships,
and to support the differing views required to support the various classes of
decisions relative to the assessment and implementation of the architecture. For
the sake of completeness its must be possible to relate the formal products of
each of these architectural disciplines to each other.
The notation used for one architectural disciple must therefore provide traceability
through to the related components, aggregations or the notations within the
other, related architecture disciplines. Looking
at the completed set of architectural products for each of the architectural
disciplines there will be components that address each of the rows and columns
of the Zachman Framework. That is to
say a complete architecture must provide an Owner, Business, System, Designer
and Builder view and must address each of the critical questions; “What”,
“How”, “Where”, “Who”, “When” and “Why”.
What will be different is the degree of abstraction and the amount of
specificity of the representation, which is based on the needs of the
discipline. Enterprise Architecture is often defined in terms of its constituent architectures, as being the sum of;
Note that this diagram should not be taken to mean that IT Architecture exists separate and distinct from the business Architecture, rather it is meant to show that part of the enterprise implemented in the "business" world and part (the IT part) is implemented in the virtual world. Indeed, John Zachman as says "The system is the business", but this does not mean that the reverse is true, "That the business is the system" and the interrelationships among these architectures needed to achieve the defined business strategy and supported by a governance process and ideally, based on a reference architecture. These architectures should not be approached in isolation. Together, they are intended to address important Enterprise-wide concerns, such as:
Treating the Enterprise as a system, means taking the interactions among the constituent architectures into account. By the same token, the whole point of breaking a system into parts is so that the task of analysis and design is less overwhelmingly complex, and so that specialists can focus on the parts and make progress. References |
Copyright © Neil Kemp and Associates Ltd
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