What Is Enterprise Acrhitecture Essay - 1048 Words

What is Enterprise architecture? Enterprise Architecture is the link between strategy and implementation. It is a top down view of the structure of systems; it includes the fundamental organization of a system, embodied by its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles guiding its design. It can be defined as: A means for describing business structures and processes that connect business structures. www.sei.cmu.edu/architecture/glossary.html There are four areas that are commonly accepted as the components of the overall frame work. These are: †¢ Business Process. This includes strategy, governance, organisation, and key business processes. †¢ The Data. This describes the structure of†¦show more content†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¢ Integration Realizing that the business rules are consistent across an organization, that the data and its use are immutable and information flow is standardized, and the connectivity and interoperability are managed across the enterprise. †¢ Change Facilitating and managing change to any area of the enterprise †¢ Time-to-market. Development can be speeded up and it also ensures that the selected solution is the â€Å"best fit† and allows for future growth in response to the business needs. It can also ensure that an organization is not tied to one particular vendor for a solution. Furthermore it can reduce costs by removing multiple parallel systems with one integrated system. It can also highlight opportunities for building greater quality and flexibility into applications without increasing cost. Finally, by looking at the business process it can identify new ways of thinking about how the process can be improved which in turn could provide some competitive advantage. â€Å"The primary purpose of Enterprise Architecture is to inform, guide, and constrain the decisions for the enterprise, especially those related to IT investments. The true challenge of enterprise engineering is to maintain the architecture as a primary authoritative resource for enterprise IT planning. This goal is not met via enforced policy, but by the value and utility of the information provided by the Enterprise Architecture.† Source: A Practical Guide to