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Intro To EA

1. Enterprise architecture provides an integrated view and structure for organizing an enterprise, including its business processes, applications, and technical infrastructure. 2. It serves as a common frame of reference for stakeholders to understand how different components of an enterprise relate and function together. 3. Architecture encompasses both the high-level design principles and blueprint for how an enterprise's components are organized and structured.

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37 views2 pages

Intro To EA

1. Enterprise architecture provides an integrated view and structure for organizing an enterprise, including its business processes, applications, and technical infrastructure. 2. It serves as a common frame of reference for stakeholders to understand how different components of an enterprise relate and function together. 3. Architecture encompasses both the high-level design principles and blueprint for how an enterprise's components are organized and structured.

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DGteam Ch
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1 Introduction to Enterprise Architecture

In current business practice, an integrated approach to business and IT is


indispensable. As a real-life example, take the Dutch government, who are
currently undertaking a massive redesign of the entire chain of
organisations involved in the social security system. Within this context,
the collection of employees’ social security premiums is transferred from
the central social security organisation to the tax administration. This
sounds logical, since collecting taxes is superficially very similar to
collecting social security premiums. However, this seemingly simple
change entails a major redesign of organisational structures, business
processes, IT applications, and technical infrastructure. Enormous flows of
data need to be redirected within and among the different organisations:
more than 600,000 payroll tax returns are filed each month, a large
proportion of which arrive within a peak period of a couple of days.
Controlling such changes cannot be done by just ‘winging it’. But how
can we get to grips with this complex, multi-faceted world?

1.1 Architecture

It is often said that to manage the complexity of any large organisation or


system, you need architecture. But what exactly does ‘architecture’ mean?
Of course, we have long known this notion from building and construction.
Suppose you contract an architect to design your house. You discuss how
rooms, staircases, windows, bathrooms, balconies, doors, a roof, etc., will
be put together. You agree on a master plan, on the basis of which the
architect will produce detailed specifications, to be used by the engineers
and builders.
How is it that you can communicate so efficiently about that master
plan? We think it is because you share a common frame of reference: you
both know what a ‘room’ is, a ‘balcony’, a ‘staircase’, etc. You know their
function and their relation. A ‘room’, for example, serves as a shelter and
is connected to another ‘room’ via a ‘door’. You both use, mentally, an ar-
chitectural model of a house. This model defines its major functions and
how they are structured. It provides an abstract design, ignoring many

M. Lankhorst et al., Enterprise Architecture at Work, The Enterprise Engineering Series,


DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-01310-2_1, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009
2 Introduction to Enterprise Architecture

details. These details, like the number of rooms, dimensions, materials to


be used, and colours, will be filled in later.
A similar frame of reference is needed in designing an enterprise. To
create an overview of the structure of an organisation, its business proc-
esses, their application support, and the technical infrastructure, you need
to express the different aspects and domains, and their relations.
But what is ‘architecture’ exactly? Even in building and construction,
the term is not without ambiguity. It can signify the art and science of de-
signing the built environment, or the product of such a design. Thus, the
term architecture can encompass both the blueprint for a building and the
general underlying principles such as its style, as in ‘gothic architecture’.
There are different schools of thought on this. Some say we should reserve
the term ‘architecture’ in the context of IT solely for such principles and
constraints on the design space, as e.g. Dietz argues (2006), who uses the
term ‘enterprise ontology’ for the actual designs. In this book, we will use
the IEEE 1471-2000 / ISO/IEC 42010:2007 (IEEE Computer Society
2000; see also Sect. 2.2.2) definition of architecture:

Architecture is the fundamental organisation of a system embodied


in its components, their relationships to each other, and to the envi-
ronment, and the principle guiding its design and evolution.
This definition accommodates both the blueprint and the general
principles. More succinctly, we could define architecture as ‘structure with
a vision’. An architecture provides an integrated view of the system being
designed or studied.
As well as the definition of architecture, we will use two other
important notions from the IEEE standard. First, a ‘stakeholder’ is
defined as follows:

Stakeholder: an individual, team, or organisation (or classes


thereof) with interests in, or concerns relative to, a system.
Most stakeholders of a system are probably not interested in its
architecture, but only in the impact of this on their concerns. However, an
architect needs to be aware of these concerns and discuss them with the
stakeholders, and thus should be able to explain the architecture to all
stakeholders involved, who will often have completely different
backgrounds.

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