Getting Started
What are the benefits of Enterprise Architecture?
Enterprise Architecture will deliver significant improvements in the following areas:
- The ability to rapidly adjust and adapt to new business circumstances
- The efficient and strategic use of applications & technology across the merged legal entities, and realisation of the Target Enterprise Architecture.
- The management of information/data and knowledge as a corporate asset
- The alignment between IT and business for planning and execution purposes
- The transparency, impartiality, quality and objectivity of architecture decision making (re: architecture requirements - Topics & Gaps)
- The management of change based on a clear understanding of its impact
- The optimisation, cost effectiveness, efficiency of the IT solutions
- The reduction of application complexity, and increased reuse of existing IT assets
- The reporting of performance results, and auditing of changes
Risks of no Enterprise Architecture
Failure to implement an Enterprise Architecture will present the following risks:
- Inability to rapidly respond to challenges driven by business changes
- Lack of focus on enterprise requirements
- Lack of common direction and synergies
- Incomplete visibility of the current and future target enterprise architecture vision
- Inability to predict impacts of future changes
- Increased gaps and architecture conflicts
- Lack of commonality and consistency due to the absence of standards
- Dilution and dissipation of critical information and knowledge of the deployed solutions
- Rigidity, redundancy and lack of scalability and flexibility in the deployed solutions
- Lack of integration, compatibility and interoperability between applications
- Complex, fragile and costly interfaces between incongruent applications
- Decision-making gridlock
- Piece-meal and ad hoc software development driven by a tactical and reactive approach
The Enterprise Architecture is …
The Enterprise Architecture is :
- An analysis tool to provide abstraction and modelling capabilities at all levels and perspective of the enterprise architecture
- A planning tool to translate strategic thinking into architecture roadmap of future development and integration
- An analysis tool to clearly plot the key relationships and dependencies between the business services, business processes, applications and technology
- A decision-making tool to provide a framework for evaluating-, selecting and justifying strategic development options (Topics) and solutions (architecture decisions)
- A design tool to provide the required support, in the form of industry best practice design approaches, patterns, guidelines, and reference models
- A change management tool to provide a framework for synchronising and coordinating development activities across multiple development projects and initiatives
- A governance tool to provide a sole architecture design authority and a master repository for the target enterprise architecture, and a single architectural blueprint of principles, standards, patterns, policies, guidelines, reference models, reusable assets and templates
- An alignment tool to provide an essential bridge between business strategy and IT delivery, and to furnish business managers with a non-technical over view of the enterprise architecture and how it supports the operating model
page revision: 8, last edited: 09 May 2008 13:56