Enterprise Architecture

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1 Introduction

Enterprise architecture (EA) is the practice of conducting enterprise analysis, design, planning, and implementation using a holistic approach for the successful development and execution of strategy. EA applies architecture principles and practices to guide organizations through the business, information, process, and technology changes necessary to execute their organization’s strategies.

Like many other disciplines, EA is evolving. [1] The EA concept dates back to the late 1980s as a response to the increased complexity associated with the introduction of distributed computing. For the first time, the unmanaged and uncontrolled replication of systems providing similar capabilities, as well as the same or very similar data sets were springing up around the enterprise. The result was increased difficulty in integrating and evolving systems to address changing business needs. The initial EA concept was to adopt an enterprise-wide view of an organization’s computing resources. By developing and applying standards and governance throughout the organization, unnecessary complexity and redundancy could be avoided.

EA provides this enterprise-wide view. Although it was initially motivated by the need to control EIT expense, EA is now also driven by the need for improved IT innovation, effectiveness, and efficiency in a rapidly changing business and technology environment. If done well, an organization’s enterprise architecture provides context for all the enterprise’s IT activities.

The results of the EA process provides inputs to the enterprise's strategy at the highest level. EA also takes the enterprise's strategy and figures how to manifest it throughout the organization, both high and low. <p>While there are a number of frameworks, practices, and approaches for EA, there is a generally accepted body of conventional wisdom on the subject. This chapter introduces the basic concepts and the most common practices.

2 Goals and Principles

The goals of the Enterprise Architecture effort in an organization should be:

• Help the enterprise understand its current operations.
  A major function of EA is revealing and documenting the relationships between business elements, information elements, and the underlying information technology and technology infrastructure. By demonstrating these interrelationships from a systems level down to the most detailed element or artifact level, EA provides the information needed to connect an organization’s conceptual business strategy to the execution of that strategy.
• Guide the organization to the desired future (“To Be”) state.
  Carefully understand the enterprises long-term goals and future desired state. Provide holistic information and insights to help executives and IT make better decisions and to identify opportunities to implement solutions that will enable the organization to reach the future desired state.
• Align IT with the enterprise’s business.
  In the best of all worlds, EA can create a bridge between the needs of the organization and the support provided by EIT. EIT/business alignment has become an increasingly widespread goal for EA, and has become the dominant value proposition for EA. Alignment activities, such as the mapping of business roles and processes to information data flows and the underlying EIT systems and technology that support them, creates this alignment.
• Help manage the complexity of the business, of IT, and the relationship between the two.
  The elimination of unnecessary complexity was the earliest justification for EA. Eliminating complexity makes EIT solutions easier to understand, easier to control, and, therefore, less expensive to develop, operate, and maintain. An EA-based framework and roadmap provide a means to eliminate redundancy as well as the integration of systems and data.
• Facilitate organizational change, transformation, and agility.
  In a business and technology environment of continuous and rapid change, organizations that can anticipate and respond appropriately and quickly are more likely to survive. Robust EA processes, such as providing artifacts (requirements, specifications, guiding principles, and conceptual models) that describe the desired future state of enterprise and the path to get there can enable rapid change.

The principles of Enterprise Architecture include:

• Architectural decisions seek to simplify operations.
• Decision are based on long-term strategy, even at the expense of short-term profitability.
• Think globally, act locally. Architectural decisions for solutions consider the impact on the entire enterprise.
• Business goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
• The definition of the desired future state and the path to get there are re-evaluated often.
• Processes and changes should promote collaboration between the business and IT.
• The effectiveness of the architecture and the adherence to the architecture must be demonstrable and measurable.
• Models are only useful when they are accurate and kept current.

3 Context Diagram

Figure 1. Context Diagram for Enterprise Architecture

4 What is Enterprise Architecture?

The first definition listed in a dictionary for enterprise is generally some variation on the concept of an ambitious endeavor or undertaking. Subsequent definitions define it as the entity (typically an organization) that carries out such an undertaking. This latter definition is the common understanding of the meaning of enterprise within the EA community. More specifically, the term enterprise was adopted to label not just commercial undertakings, but also such organizations as governments and nonprofits within its compass.

The formal definition of architecture cited most frequently by the EA community is the definition from ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2011:

“... “architecture” means whatever the EA framework being used (explicitly or implicitly) implies it is by the various architectural representations it recommends for use. ” [2]

The Federation for Enterprise Architecture Professional Organizations (FEAPO) defines enterprise architecture as:

“Enterprise architecture is a well-defined practice for conducting enterprise analysis, design, planning, and implementation, using a holistic approach at all times, for the successful development and execution of strategy. Enterprise architecture applies architecture principles and practices to guide organizations through the business, information, process, and technology changes necessary to execute their strategies. These practices utilize the various aspects of an enterprise to identify, motivate, and achieve these changes.” [3]

Analogies between enterprise architecture and urban planning have been made, because both define common guidelines, standards, and frameworks with which solution architects and building architects, respectively, must comply (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Urban Planner and Enterprise Architect versus Building Architect and Solution Architect [3]

4.1 The Evolution of Enterprise Architecture

The need for enterprise architecture arose for two separate reasons. The first reason was driven by technology. The arrival of distributed computing in the 1980s resulted in increased IT complexity due to additional scale, diversity, and connectivity in the computing environment. The additional complexity lead to significantly higher EIT development, support, and operational costs. With rising costs came pressure from management to slow the growth of EIT budgets and increase the business effectiveness of EIT support. Directives to “do more with less” and unrelenting pressure to increase efficiency and effectiveness required new approaches to EIT strategy. To some extent, consolidation, standardization, and commoditization worked as EIT expense reduction strategies; however, there were limits to their effectiveness, because they still lacked a holistic and systematic understanding of the connectedness between business roles and processes, information data elements and flows, supporting application systems, and underlying technology infrastructure.

The second motivation for EA was business-driven, due to the ever-increasing pace of external change combined with the difficulty for many organizations to successfully execute their business strategies. Michael Porter estimates that more than 80 percent of organizations fail to execute their business strategies, and ineffective execution was the reason for failure for more than 70 percent of them. [4] The principles and practices in EA help enterprise managers move their organizations from where they are to where they want them to be.

Based on whether one views EA solely for technology-based or business strategy-based reasons, the scope of EA, including its concerns, assumptions, and limitations varies. One of the most cogent analyses of the range of EA definitions was presented by James Lapalme, who describes three schools of thoughts on EA: [5]

• Enterprise-wide IT platform (effective enterprise strategy execution and operation through EIT-business alignment)
• Enterprise (effective enterprise strategy implementation through execution coherency)
• Enterprise-in-environment (innovation and adaptation through organizational learning)

Nick Malik builds on Lapalme’s three schools, and describes three categories of EA application: [6]

1. Enterprise IT architecting — Designing IT services and creating IT systems that address the enterprise's needs
2. Enterprise integrating — Aligning the business with all of its capabilities, including IT; using capability analysis to understand the impacts of strategy on the business processes and systems, and helping to frame the initiatives that should be created, and insures that investments are made in the right place
3. Enterprise ecological adaptation — Analyzing the movements of the market, and working closely with business leaders to develop strategies based on the capabilities and positioning of the company that are likely to generate new revenue, improve market position, improve customer loyalty, and reduce costs

These differences between these categories vis depicted graphically in Figure 3.

Figure 3. EA Schools of Thought [6]

EA can serve a number of different goals (the vertical axis of Figure 3) and can provide direction and support for a range of time horizons and enterprise value (the horizontal axis). It is important to distinguish the type of EA that an organization needs and wants to establish. By doing so, the boundaries and handoffs between EA and business executives in the execution of their business strategy become clear. Without that clarity, ongoing confusion and issues with collaboration and alignment will likely be created.

There are three base-level assumptions that EA practitioners have:

• The alignment of the business and EIT is achieved by aligning EIT with the business.
• The agility of the enterprise is a consequence of the agility of the EIT function.
• The transformative value of EA is typically delivered by transforming the application and technology architectures. One hopes that the amount of change engendered by an EA initiative is small at the business layer and increases as the design progresses closer to the details of the applications and systems; however, this isn’t always the case.

4.2 The Layers or Aspects of Enterprise Architecture

In the 1980s, a four-layer division of system architecture came into use by system designers. The architecture was split into technology, applications, information, and business domains. The domains higher in the stack were built on top of and depended upon the lower layers. The BIAT model helped system architects organize information and structure of the systems, and also helped them understand requirements that flow between these layers.

In the early 1990s, this 4-layer division, called the BIAT model [1]) was adapted for Enterprise Architecture and relatively soon was modified to a 5-layer model: the Technology layer was divided into software and hardware infrastructure layers. It also changed the focus of EA practice to that of business processes. (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Conventional BIAT Diagram & the 5-Layer BIAT Diagram

The meanings of the layers are described below.

4.2.1 Business Layer

Within the EITBOK, the term business is used synonymous with enterprise. While it may seem odd, it appears that there is no universally excepted definition of business within the EA community. This layer usually contains business rules and requirements, organizational structure, business processes and models, the mission and vision of the enterprise, and critical success factors.

4.2.2 Data or Information Layer

In the BAIT model, information is associated with business information and other valuable stored data. Every enterprise runs on information, and therefore, the patterns of information used by the business largely determine the data technology required to support the information needs. This layers contains data information and architecture, data management, data delivery, data modeling, data quality, data security, content management, as well as enterprise reporting and business intelligence.

4.2.3 Applications Layer

Software applications consume, transform, and produce data or information needed by the enterprise's technology users. Often, the heaviest information "consumers" are in HR and finance units, although software increasingly supports facilities management, inventory control, customers, and vendors. This layer contains application integration components, application development models, the definition of services, and service and event architectures.

4.2.4 Technology Layer

The technology domain includes processors, storage and network connectivity, and the middleware that provide the basic computing and communications capabilities for the enterprise. They enable the flow of information that is the lifeblood of the organization. Note that the EIT technology domain thus does not typically include physical process technology such as industrial or manufacturing automation equipment. Often this layer is split into a software and hardware component.

4.2.5 The Relationship Between the Layers

The business and information layers serve primarily as inputs to the technology design process. However, if the process is rigidly viewed this way, the EA team may run the risk of not putting enough effort into the collaboration and partnership with the enterprise’s “business” partners. Such collaboration assures that the changes in the business processes and information flows will support the changes made to the applications and technology layers.

It is common within the EA community to recognize that each of these layers has its own architecture, and that the enterprise architecture is in some sense the sum or union of all these architectures. At the same time, it is also commonly stated within the EA community that the enterprise consists of businesses + IT, and therefore, that the enterprise architecture is comprised of business architecture + IT architecture. Digging deeper IT architecture is comprised of data/information architecture, applications architecture, and technology architecture, although it is often agreed that the data/information architecture can straddle the boundary between the business and EIT domains).

There are several different models in use for how the integration across the layers or aspects is best achieved. One of the most common is the service model, in which each layer delivers services to the layers above it. Not surprisingly, the question of what exactly makes something a service remains a subject of considerable discussion. Other models focus on the enterprise’s value chain, also known as enterprise capabilities.

4.3 Role of Architecture in Strategy Planning

Enterprise architecture (EA) (http://eitbokwiki.org/Glossary#ea) informs strategic planning in several ways. EA supplies “a blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands.” [7] The blueprint comes in the form of a variety of architectural or design artifacts, such as strategy maps, capability maps, information maps, value maps, and organization maps. These maps provide a variety of perspectives, such as data and processes the enterprise uses to carry out its operations, how processes interact to create value streams, and where technology support is in place. EA provides input to the strategy function at the highest level.

Typically, few artifacts exist when the initial enterprise architecture program is started. They must be developed with input from all the business stakeholders. Given the amount of information required to produce the enterprise blueprint, a framework is needed to describe the interconnectedness of the business, information, systems, and technology elements (often called artifacts). In 1987, John Zachman published what is commonly viewed as the first framework describing a classification scheme for artifacts at several levels of abstraction. [7] In the 1990s, a reference model was developed for EA by and for the US Department of Defense (DoD) called the Technical Architecture Framework for Information Management (TAFIM).

In 1995, based on TAFIM, The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) was first released. TOGAF 9.1 was release in 2011 and it is considered a proven enterprise architecture methodology. It states that “a complete EA description should contain all four architecture domains (business, data, application, technology), but the realities of resource and time constraints often mean there is not enough time, funding, or resources to build a top-down, all-inclusive architecture description encompassing all four architecture domains, even if the enterprise scope is ... less than the full extent of the overall enterprise.” [9]

While TOGAF may be the most popular EA framework (based on published certification numbers), there are many different frameworks available. Generally, they fall into several categories: consortia developed (e.g., TOGAF), defense industry focused (e.g., DODAF (U.S.)), government-based (e.g., E-overheid NORA (Dutch), open-source (e.g., MEGAF), and proprietary (e.g., Capgemini’s IAF). [10]

5 EA Activities

Enterprise Architecture is an ongoing activity. It is always in process. It never stops. The architecture team must perennially keep up with the current state of the ever-evolving organization and its business. Just as important, Enterprise Architecture is working with management to understand what they want the future to be. The path to get to the future is constantly being refined.

The Open Group describes an approach that it calls the Architecture Development Model (ADM) that consists of a number of iterative phases, as shown in Figure 6. [14]

Figure 6. TOGAF 9.1 ADM Steps [14]

Although there are some differing opinions about the way to create an EA, the TOGAF ADM steps provide an excellent outline to discuss the different activities that are part of the process and that is why we include it here. Note that all these steps associated collect and drive the refinement of business requirements that are used for business solution design. These requirements need to be carefully managed and kept in a database (often called a repository).

5.1 The Preliminary Phase: Preparing and planning the EA Effort

During the planning phase members of senior management (usually members of the strategy team) define the purpose and focus of the EA program, create the EA team and defines the roles of the team members. Once that is accomplished, the EA team selects the EA framework that will be used by the effort and makes sure that there is an EA information repository in place.

The EA team will begin its work by collecting information about the workings of the enterprise. More than anything else, the EA effort results in an actionable plan to achieve the enterprise’s strategic objectives. The plan needs to consider laws, mandates, and policies that drive the business. The plan will typically build on the organization's strengths and leverage opportunities, while considering both internal and external impediments and barriers. The EA plan provides the bridge between strategy and execution. Thus, the EA can drive organizational change, enabling the enterprise to achieve important mission outcomes and enhance business success.

5.1.1 Specify the EA Team’s Priorities, Scope, and Budget

Once an EA effort has been agreed, the enterprise’s management needs to give the effort a charter. This charter could be well defined or not; however, the effort will be most successful if management can provide information such as:

• What the team should work on and what the priorities are; this include at least some idea of what the desire state of the organization is
• What the team needs to accomplish and by when
• Who the team reports to, how often they should report, and what they should report
• How the process is going to be governed
• The budget for the EA project

With this in place, the team can be identified.

5.1.2 Determine EA Team Members

Selecting the EA team members is often a difficult process. One needs to have a chief architect who understands the business and communicates well with people at all levels in the organization. The person must be technically savvy, have EA experience, be good at working with diverse groups with diverse agendas, and be excellent at project management in difficult situations. Few organizations start out with this kind of talent, so it is common for organizations to hire EA consulting firms to get them started, and to help them build and train their own internal team.

You can have an EA team of one, the Lead Enterprise Architect. However, usually the job requires information from several business experts and EIT experts. The number of roles and their duties depends on the scope of the EA effort. Common roles that are often consulted are:

• Business Architect
• Information Architect
• Security Architect
• Solution Architect
• Domain Architect
• Project Architect
• Application Architect
• Business Unit Manager
• Subject Matter Expert
• Process Owner
• Compliance Manager
• HR Manager
• Finance Manager

Note that the team will often start small and increase in size as the AE effort progresses. Many of the future AE activities will require specialist for that particular activity, such as the application architect.

5.1.3 Identify Business Drivers, Impediments & Barriers

The team needs to identify the internal and external forces that push the enterprise in specific directions. Drivers can come from governmental legislation, policy, business competition, technology changes, cost changes, organizational restructuring and consolidation, or facility changes. These drivers often result in the definition of key business requirements and strongly affect the architecture at many levels.

Barriers and impediments obstruct or delay the progress of developing or maintaining a useful enterprise architecture. Barriers hinder development of the enterprise architecture to accommodate a need or constraint in contrast to drivers which direct or push the architecture in particular ways.

This activity will start in the preliminary phase, but will be fleshed out extensively in future phases of the EA project.

5.1.4 Select Architectural Framework, Methods, and Processes

One of the most important preparation activities for the EA effort is selecting the architectural framework that will drive the process and organize the collection of information. In the 1980s, people discovered that the simple BIAT layer architectural model was not complete or complex enough to effectively organize most EA efforts. Since then, different groups have developed ever more complex frameworks that connect the architectural aspects of BIAT with the specifics of when and how to create and use the architecture.

Figure 7 depicts Capgemini's early Integrated Architecture Framework (IAF) [12]. In this diagram, the BIAT aspects are shown vertically and the horizontal layers depict varying degrees of abstraction. The layers extend from the enterprise perspective down to the technical implementations through requirements management and construction:

• Contextual — Why: the connection to the business strategy and principles
• Conceptual — What: the service level
• Logical — How: the logical flows
• Physical — With what: the specific elements
• Transformational — When: the dynamic dimension that specifies when the organization will change to the desired state

With these additional layers, different perspectives and dimensions of detail become more apparent than when using the simple BIAT model.

Figure 8 shows the Zachman Framework in which artifacts are organized by the audience perspective and the the focus of the artifact. [11] The concept was derived through observation of design artifacts of various physical objects like airplanes, buildings, ships, and computers. Zachman observed that design documents (descriptive representations, product descriptions, and engineering documentation) of complex products can be classified by the audience (the person’s perspective when looking at the information) for which the artifact is constructed and by the content or subject focus (abstraction) of the artifact.

Basically, the Zachman Framework is a generic classification scheme (referred to as an ontology) for design artifacts. It enables an EA team to focus on specific aspects of an artifact without losing the context or perspective from which it comes. In designing and building complex objects, there are simply too many details and relationships to consider simultaneously, and this structure helps decrease the complexity without losing information.

Figure 7. A Populated Version of Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture [11]

The Open Group’s TOGAF Enterprise Architecture Framework (http://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf8-doc/arch/ is a more generic architecture that contends that there are four architectures that make up the enterprise architecture (BIAT) and all of them need to be modeled individually, but kept consistent in the process.

This framework and the associate Architectural Development Method (ADM) uses concepts from the Zachman Framework, but covers each level of architecture with tools and artifacts that are most appropriate for that level. It doesn’t, however, dictate any particular method for creating the architecture. The ADM even has room for integrating in other frameworks that are needed due to the domain or business drivers.

There are many other frameworks and some are defined for specific domains or technologies. Some of these frameworks are proprietary and others are available for anyone to use. To see a list of both Enterprise Architectures and solution architectures, visit http://www.iso-architecture.org/42010/afs/frameworks-table.html. In general, the EA team will select the framework or frameworks that best match the enterprise’s needs, the maturity of the organization, and the team’s comfort and experience with the framework.

5.2 Developing an Enterprise Architecture

Developing an EA includes all the activities associated with creating and maintaining the enterprise architecture for a specific purpose. The EA plan provides the blueprint for transforming the enterprise from the current state to the desired end state that can execute the desire outcomes. That desired state will likely need to address organizational change, business process transformations, data integration, systems reengineering, and technology modernization.

EA serves as a bridge between the enterprise’s vision and strategy and how the underlying layers of business elements (including business processes and people) are organized, as well as the flow of information and data elements. Business processes and information are not necessarily automated by EIT. For example, without EIT automation, workers can manually take measurements, create reports, and deliver data and information in those reports. Nonetheless, a complete Enterprise Architecture will include those un-automated business elements. On the other hand, where business process and information flows are automated with EIT, EA describes the interdependencies and linkages between different parts of the enterprise, information, applications, and technology infrastructure.

Distinguishing between EA and EIT is important, and by doing so, an organization should clearly recognize that there is a choice to either support business roles, business processes, and information flows with automation or keep them manual.<p>

5.2.1 Develop the Architectural Vision

<p>Once senior management has approved the start of the architectural work, the first task is to create the architectural vision. The architecture vision is a high-level description of the current and desired architectures, most likely an enhanced vision from the outputs from senior management’s strategic planning sessions (see Chapter Strat & Gov).

The vision describes what will be delivered and its desired impact on the organization, including the business, data, application, and technology layers. These high-level descriptions are further developed in subsequent phases. The architectural vision also typically outlines a program that will develop and deploy the vision.

The artifact of this effort is often called the Statement of Architecture Work. This document is circulated among management and all the stakeholders to build a consensus. This consensus building process is critical and can make or break the entire EA effort. And, one of the most important aspects of this document is the definition of the scope of the effort.

5.2.1.1 Define the AS IS and TO BE States

Whether developing a long-term enterprise strategy or understanding your current and desired technical architectural capacity, you can’t get to where you want to go unless you know where you are. The EA planning process needs to clearly understand the enterprise’s and IT’s current (a.k.a. “As Is”) states as well as the direction the enterprise wants to head, in other words, the desired (a.k.a. “To Be”) states. This is a careful analysis process and it is critical to the success of the endeavor.

Along with definition of these states, this process should be able to define the purpose of the upcoming EA effort. What does the business want to accomplish with the project? What elements of the business are not well aligned and must be corrected in the future? The team identifies the investment decisions or technical directions that need guidance.

The strategy is most often a long-range plan for achieving organizational goals to meet mission priorities while effectively using available resources. A strategy is often formulated to help an organization achieve an economic, competitive, or positional advantage.

It is important to note that there is significant disagreement as to exactly how to define the “AS IS” and “To Be” states. Some AE teams believe that you should describe the current state first and then create the vision of the future state. Others believe that the AE team should define the future state before understanding the current state. This second group believes that if you know the current state well, it will influence your vision of the future state too much. They believe that people have a tendency of “editing” their vision of the future based upon what the already know about the present. It is true that the future state definition might need to be “scaled back” when it is determined to be unfeasible; however, during this phase, the vision of the future should be relatively unbridled.

5.2.1.2 Define the Scope of the EA Effort

The scope of the enterprise architecture establishes many aspects of this current enterprise architecture project. In essence, the team defines what part of the “To Be” or desired state they want to focus on in this current cycle. Things that can be considered are:

• The organizations within the business that are in focus — Not only are the actual organizations identified, but a specific business process or data set may be selected. In the best of all worlds, the entire enterprise or organization is addressed; however, resources don’t always allow that to happen.
• The areas of technology — At times, an EA planning cycle will only cover selected areas or levels of technology. One year an organization might focus on establishing the enterprise architecture for communications of the organization (which could include telecom, intranet, internet, and other connectivity). The next year, they might focus on mobile support.
• The level of detail that needs to be included in the enterprise architecture — The enterprise architecture should contain enough detail to
  • Plan major investments, their lifecycles, and projected costs.
  • Demonstrate that the enterprise strategy is supported by the enterprise architecture in the timeframe needed.
  • Ensure that needed interfaces between organizations and between IT systems are adequately specified.
  • Guide systems engineers who are developing designs and specifications for implementing specific investments.

  On the other hand, the EA should not be so detailed that it over-constrains the enterprise. And, it should be sufficiently general to provide latitude in system design decisions and be responsive to technology changes.

• The planning time horizon — Large organizations often synchronize this scope with the three- to five-year major enterprise planning or budgeting cycle; however, others organizations believe that the planning timeframe needs to be either shorter or more flexible so that the organization can respond faster to unforeseen events and influences.

6 Enterprise IT Architecture and Relationships to Other Disciplines

Enterprise architecture is valuable and useful if it influences and integrates the inputs and outputs of other architecture disciplines into the enterprise, as well as bridges between the enterprise strategy and the IS/EIT projects.

6.1 The Relationship between EA and Other Architectures

A recent survey conducted by the Journal of Enterprise Architecture asked survey respondents for their titles. Among the respondents who had architect in their title, there were 21 different non-level-related modifiers. Labels that architects use rather than enterprise architect include business process architect, information architect, applications architect, solution architect, software architect, middleware architect, infrastructure architect, network architect, network storage architect, and hardware architect.

Figure 9 shows that the simple view of enterprise architecture (first introduced in Figure 5) also describes other typical architecture types. All of them must consider solution, information, application, software, middleware, infrastructure, and network storage.

Figure 9. Enterprise and Other Enterprise-related Architectures

6.2 The Relationship between Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise IT

EA serves as a bridge between the enterprise’s vision and strategy and how the underlying layers of business elements (including business processes and people) are organized, as well as the flow of information and data elements. Business processes and information are not necessarily automated with IS/IT. For example, without IS/IT automation, workers can manually take measurements, create reports, and deliver data and information in those reports. On the other hand, where business process and information flows are automated with IS/EIT, EA describes the interdependencies and linkages between the business (organization), information, applications, and technology infrastructure.

In contrast, enterprise IT (EIT) consists of the applications and technology infrastructure that supports the applications, so today EIT is increasingly seen as a subset of EA.

Distinguishing between EA and EIT is important, and by doing so, an organization should clearly recognize that there is a choice to either support business roles, business processes, and information flows with automation (i.e., IS/EIT) or keep them manual. Likewise, the governance and influence of EA is different than the governance and influence of EIT.

Artifacts (i.e., outputs or deliverables) from EA are found as inputs to strategy and governance as well as requirements (and subsequently, construction). Here are some examples:

• Strategy maps
• Capability maps
• Information maps
• Value maps
• Heat maps
• Organization maps
• Operating models
• Product maps
• Stakeholder maps
• Process models
• Dynamic rules based routing maps
• Data models
• Network models
• Systems models
• Vitality and renewal plans
• A wide range of hybrid blueprints and models with specialty uses based on the challenge at hand

6.3 Solutions and Their Relationship to EA

There are different ways to view the landscape of the enterprise’s IT architecture. At the fundamental level, EA physical and logical artifacts describe the elements that support the organization’s operations. At a more conceptual level, there are the business, information, information technology, and infrastructure services. These can be related to an organization’s capabilities. Relatively speaking, these can be characterized in a colored heat map that uses color to represent different attributes or identify focus areas in a data set. Depending on the organization’s strategy, the capabilities that are most in need of improvement might be the first priority. Improvement/replacement costs, interdependencies with other capabilities and systems, risks of not improving, and so on are inputs to the prioritization process. The funding and governance of the improvement work (in the form of projects and programs) are strongly influenced by EA and typically overseen by a program management office (see the Change Strategy and Governance chapter). The projects and programs develop solution architectures and these solution architectures need to be compliant to and synergistic with the evolving enterprise architecture.

6.4 EA and Nonfunctional Requirements or Cross-layer Concerns

The Requirements chapter discusses the two types of requirements, functional and non-functional. While EA influences both types, its impact on functional requirements is more obvious. However, EA also influences nonfunctional requirements and can do so through the overriding EA principles as well as in what are called collaboration contracts between EA artifacts. Here are some examples.

• Business service collaboration contracts: A business service, or a set of business processes like a financial operation and its expectations in receiving information data elements from a sales service (e.g., an order entry from a sales operation).
• Technology infrastructure component collaboration contracts: Storage components and networking components. Collaboration contracts between the two might be the quality and reliability expectations in terms of up time, error-free processing, messaging, latency, and so on.

In these contracts, expectations of various qualities are defined and documented in delivery projects as nonfunctional requirements. By keeping the close association between the collaboration contracts of all the artifacts in the EA repository with the nonfunctional requirements in the enterprise IT portfolio of projects, the quality requirements and expectations across the enterprise can be balanced.

6.5 EA and Business Architecture and BPM

The discipline of EA has evolved in parallel to the discipline of business process modeling (BPM). Clearly, the business architecture needs to be characterized and described in both EA and BPM “languages” and tools. Over the last decade, this relationship has been recognized and the companies who are developing and providing EA and BPM tools are helping to bridge the gap. Likewise, the respective expert communities recognize the need and are starting to address it.

6.6 EA and Scope

It is important to note that EA does not necessarily mean across an entire enterprise. EA can be narrowed to a particular “subject of concern” and a “scope” for that concern. Enterprise can be the scope (“enterprise-wide”) and, in a different way, it can be viewed as the subject. TOGAF goes into detail about the different ways of looking at EA. Overall, remember that the organization is the definer of scopes, whether it is an extended organization, specific organization, business unit, function, or department. EA is not necessarily enterprise-wide. And orthogonally, the scope can be narrow and needs to be defined in terms of domains to be considered, such as business, information, data, application, platforms, infrastructure (software and hardware), and technology (network and storage). It may depend on whether the EA team is EIT-centric or enterprise-centric. Also, there are sometimes several EA teams working simultaneously on small chunks that must be integrated.

7 Summary

There are three almost universally adopted concepts that characterize the current state of the art of enterprise architecture:

• The four-layer stack model — or the four aspects — of an enterprise
• The as is and to be states
• The use of EA frameworks

Enterprise architecture should clearly influence and be influenced by strategy and governance. Additionally, there is a strong connection to requirements. Likewise, an interdependency exists between the enterprise architecture and the solution architecture (SA) for a particular application (solution architecture is included in the Construction chapter).

Enterprise architecture can be defined by its scope and subject; it can be about an entire organization or can be narrowed down to a segment, unit, or function. So EA is scalable and can be small and incremental as well as enterprise-wide.

EA can assist in both short- and long-term enterprise improvement and transformation planning.

Successful EA functions must be able to balance high-level strategic work with tactical governance and collaboration with solution architectures in the enterprise’s IT portfolio so that the portfolio provides ongoing and clear impact and value.

A useful, practical, and functioning EA framework should have independent and modular elements, and, at the same time, be able to show an integrated and interdependent view of all of the elements.

8 Key Maturity Frameworks

Capability maturity for EIT refers to its ability to reliably perform. Maturity is a measured by an organization’s readiness and capability expressed through its people, processes, data and technologies and the consistent measurement practices that are in place. Please see Appendix F for additional information about maturity frameworks.

Many specialized frameworks have been developed since the original Capability Maturity Model (CMM) that was developed by the Software Engineering Institute in the late 1980s. This section describes how some of those apply to the activities described in this chapter.

8.1 IT-Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF)

The IT-CMF was developed by the Innovation Value Institute in Ireland. It helps organizations to measure, develop, and monitor their EIT capability maturity progression. It consists of 35 IT management capabilities that are organized into four macro capabilities:

• Managing IT like a business
• Managing the IT budget
• Managing the IT capability
• Managing IT for business value

Each has five different levels of maturity starting from initial to optimizing. The most relevant critical capability is Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM).

8.1.1 Enterprise Architecture Management Maturity

The following statements provide a high-level overview of the Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) capability at successive levels of maturity.

Level 1	Enterprise architecture is conducted within the context of individual projects, by applying one-off principles and methods within those projects.
Level 2	A limited number of basic architecture artefacts and practices are emerging in certain IT domains or key projects.
Level 3	A common suite of enterprise architecture principles and methods are shared across the IT function, allowing a unifying vision of enterprise architecture to emerge.
Level 4	Planning by the IT function and the rest of the business consistently leverages enterprise-wide architecture principles and methods to enable efficiency and agility across the organization.
Level 5	Enterprise architecture principles and methods are continually reviewed to maintain their ability to deliver business value.

9 Key Competence Frameworks

While many large companies have defined their own sets of skills for purposes of talent management (to recruit, retain, and further develop the highest quality staff members that they can find, afford and hire), the advancement of EIT professionalism will require common definitions of EIT skills that can be used not just across enterprises, but also across countries. We have selected 3 major sources of skill definitions. While none of them is used universally, they provide a good cross-section of options.

Creating mappings between these frameworks and our chapters is challenging, because they come from different perspectives and have different goals. There is rarely a 100% correspondence between the frameworks and our chapters, and, despite careful consideration some subjectivity was used to create the mappings. Please take that in consideration as you review them.

The framework skills mapping exercise for Enterprise Architecture (EA) was one of significant controversy. Suggested mapping depended on a particular individual’s personal definition of EA. Some individuals have a very narrow definition for EA, while other definitions are wide and greatly more encompassing. The EITBOK has adopted a rather wide scope for EA, and the framework mappings below reflect this wide scope.

9.1 Skills Framework for the Information Age

The Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) has defined nearly 100 skills. SFIA describes 7 levels of competency which can be applied to each skill. Not all skills, however, cover all seven levels. Some reach only partially up the seven step ladder. Others are based on mastering foundational skills, and start at the fourth or fifth level of competency. It is used in nearly 200 countries, from Britain to South Africa, South America, to the Pacific Rim, to the United States. (http://www.sfia-online.org)

Skill	Skill Description	Competency Levels
IT governance	The establishment and oversight of an organisation's approach to the use of information, digital services and associated technology. Includes responsibility for provision of digital services; levels of service and service quality which meet current and future business requirements; policies and practices for conformance with mandatory legislation and regulations; strategic plans for technology to enable the organisation's business strategy; transparent decision making, leading to justification for investment, with appropriate balance between stakeholder benefits, opportunities, costs, and risks.	5-7
Information systems coordination	Typically within a large organisation in which the information strategy function is devolved to autonomous units, or within a collaborative enterprise of otherwise independent organisations, the coordination of information strategy matters where the adoption of a common approach (such as shared services) would benefit the organisation.	6-7
Information security	The selection, design, justification, implementation and operation of controls and management strategies to maintain the security, confidentiality, integrity, availability, accountability and relevant compliance of information systems with legislation, regulation and relevant standards.	5-7
Technical specialism	The development and exploitation of expertise in any specific area of information or communications technology, technique, method, product or application area.	5-6
Innovation	The capability to recognise and exploit business opportunities provided by information and communication technology, best practices, methods and standards, to ensure more efficient and effective performance of organisations, to explore possibilities for new ways of conducting business and organisational processes, and to establish new services or businesses.	5-6
Enterprise and business architecture	The creation, iteration, and maintenance of structures such as enterprise and business architectures embodying the key principles, methods and models that describe the organisation's future state, and that enable its evolution. This typically involves the interpretation of business goals and drivers; the translation of business strategy and objectives into an “operating model”; the strategic assessment of current capabilities; the identification of required changes in capabilities; and the description of inter-relationships between people, organisation, service, process, data, information, technology and the external environment. The architecture development process supports the formation of the constraints, standards and guiding principles necessary to define, assure and govern the required evolution; this facilitates change in the organisation's structure, business processes, systems and infrastructure in order to achieve predictable transition to the intended state.	5-7
Emerging technology monitoring	The identification of new and emerging hardware, software and communication technologies and products, services, methods and techniques and the assessment of their relevance and potential value as business enablers, improvements in cost/performance or sustainability. The promotion of emerging technology awareness among staff and business management.	5-6
Network planning	The creation and maintenance of overall network plans, encompassing the communication of data, voice, text and image, in the support of an organisation's business strategy. This includes participation in the creation of service level agreements and the planning of all aspects of infrastructure necessary to ensure provision of network services to meet such agreements. Physical implementation may include copper wire, fibre-optic, wireless, or any other technology.	5-6
Data management	The management of practices and processes to ensure the security, integrity, safety and availability of all forms of data and data structures that make up the organisation’s information. The management of data and information in all its forms and the analysis of information structure (including logical analysis of taxonomies, data and metadata). The development of innovative ways of managing the information assets of the organisation.	5-6
Methods and tools	Ensuring that appropriate methods and tools for the planning, development, testing, operation, management and maintenance of systems are adopted and used effectively throughout the organisation.	5-6
Requirements definition and management	The definition and management of the business goals and scope of change initiatives. The specification of business requirements to a level that enables effective delivery of agreed changes.	5-6
Network design	The production of network designs and design policies, strategies, architectures and documentation, covering voice, data, text, e-mail, facsimile and image, to support strategy and business requirements for connectivity, capacity, interfacing, security, resilience, recovery, access and remote access. This may incorporate all aspects of the communications infrastructure, internal and external, mobile, public and private, Internet, Intranet and call centres.	5-6
Database design	The specification, design and maintenance of mechanisms for storage and access to both structured and unstructured information, in support of business information needs.	5-6
Information management	The overall governance of how all types of information, structured and unstructured, whether produced internally or externally, are used to support decision-making, business processes and digital services. Encompasses development and promotion of the strategy and policies covering the design of information structures and taxonomies, the setting of policies for the sourcing and maintenance of the data content, and the development of policies, procedures, working practices and training to promote compliance with legislation regulating all aspects of holding, use and disclosure of data.	5-7
IT strategy and planning	The creation, iteration and maintenance of a strategy in order to align IT plans with business objectives and the development of plans to drive forward and execute that strategy. Working with stakeholders to communicate and embed strategic management via objectives, accountabilities and monitoring of progress.	5-7
Technical specialism	The development and exploitation of expertise in any specific area of information or communications technology, technique, method, product or application area.	5-6
Business modelling	The production of abstract or distilled representations of real world, business or gaming situations in traditional or trans-media applications, to aid the communication and understanding of existing, conceptual or proposed scenarios. Predominantly focused around the representation of processes, roles, data, organisation and time. Models may be used to represent a subject at varying levels of detail and decomposition.	5-6
User experience analysis	The identification, analysis, clarification and communication of the context of use in which applications will operate, and of the goals of products, systems or services. Analysis and prioritisation of stakeholders’ “user experience” needs and definition of required system behaviour and performance. Resolution of potential conflicts between user requirements and determination of usability objectives.	5
User experience design	The iterative development of user tasks, interaction and interfaces to meet user requirements, considering the whole user experience. Refinement of design solutions in response to user-centred evaluation and feedback and communication of the design to those responsible for implementation.	5-6
Analytics	The validation and analysis of significant volumes of data, including the ability to discover and quantify patterns and trends in numbers, symbols, text, sound and image. Relevant techniques may include statistical and data mining algorithms and machine learning methods such as rule induction, artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms and automated indexing systems.	6-7

9.2 European Competency Framework

The European Union’s European e-Competence Framework (e-CF) has 40 competences and is used by a large number of companies, qualification providers and others in public and private sectors across the EU. It uses five levels of competence proficiency (e-1 to e-5). No competence is subject to all five levels.

The e-CF is published and legally owned by CEN, the European Committee for Standardization, and its National Member Bodies (http://www.cen.eu). Its creation and maintenance has been co-financed and politically supported by the European Commission, in particular, DG (Directorate General) Enterprise and Industry, with contributions from the EU ICT multi-stakeholder community, to support competitiveness, innovation, and job creation in European industry. The Commission works on a number of initiatives to boost ICT skills in the workforce. Version 1.0 to 3.0 were published as CEN Workshop Agreements (CWA). The e-CF 3.0 CWA 16234-1 was published as an official European Norm (EN), EN 16234-1. For complete information, please see http://www.ecompetences.eu.

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e-CF Dimension 2	e-CF Dimension 3
A.1. IS and business Strategy Alignment (PLAN) Anticipates long term business requirements, influences improvement of organisational process efficiency and effectivenes. Determines the IS model and the enterprise architecture in line with the organisation’s policy and ensures a secure environment. Makes strategic IS policy decisions for the enterprise, including sourcing strategies.	Level 4-5
A.3. Business Plan Development (PLAN) Addresses the design and structure of a business or product plan including the identification of alternative approaches as well as return on investment propositions. Considers the possible and applicable sourcing models. Presents cost benefit analysis and reasoned arguments in support of the selected strategy. Ensures compliance with business and technology strategies. Communicates and sells business plan to relevant stakeholders and addresses political, financial, and organizational interests.	Level 3-5
A.4. Product / Service Planning (PLAN) Analyses and defines current and target status. Estimates cost effectiveness, points of risk, opportunities, strengths and weaknesses, with a critical approach. Creates structured plans; establishes time scales and milestones, ensuring optimisation of activities and resources. Manages change requests. Defines delivery quantity and provides an overview of additional documentation requirements. Specifies correct handling of products, including legal issues, in accordance with current regulations.	Level 2-4
A.5. Architecture Design (PLAN) Specifies, refines, updates and makes available a formal approach to implement solutions, necessary to develop and operate the IS architecture. Identifies change requirements and the components involved: hardware, software, applications, processes, information and technology platform. Takes into account interoperability, scalability, usability and security. Maintains alignment between business evolution and technology developments.	Level 3-5
A.7. Technology Trend Monitoring (PLAN) Investigates latest ICT technological developments to establish understanding of evolving technologies. Devises innovative solutions for integration of new technology into existing products, applications or services or for the creation of new solutions.	Level 4-5
D.10. Information and Knowledge Management (ENABLE) Identifies and manages structured and unstructured information and considers information distribution policies. Creates information structure to enable exploitation and optimisation of information. Understands appropriate tools to be deployed to create, extract, maintain, renew and propagate business knowledge in order to capitalise from the information asset.	Level 3-5
D.11. Needs Identification (ENABLE) Actively listens to internal / external customers, articulates and clarifies their needs. Manages the relationship with all stakeholders to ensure that the solution is in line with business requirements. Proposes different solutions (e.g. make-or-buy), by performing contextual analysis in support of user centered system design. Advises the customer on appropriate solution choices. Acts as an advocate engaging in the implementation or configuration process of the chosen solution.	Level 3-5

9.3 i Competency Dictionary

The Information Technology Promotion Agency (IPA) of Japan has developed the i Competency Dictionary (iCD), translated it into English, and describes it at https://www.ipa.go.jp/english/humandev/icd.html. It is an extensive skills and tasks database, used in Japan and southeast Asian countries. It establishes a taxonomy of tasks and the skills required to perform the tasks. The IPA is also responsible for the Information Technology Engineers Examination (ITEE), which has grown into one of the largest scale national examinations in Japan, with approximately 600,000 applicants each year.

The iCD consists of a Task Dictionary and a Skill Dictionary. Skills for a specific task are identified via a “Task x Skill” table. (Please see Appendix A for the task layer and skill layer structures.) EITBOK activities in each chapter require several tasks in the Task Dictionary. The complete iCD Task Dictionary (Layer 1-4) and Skill Dictionary (Layer 1-4) can be obtained by returning the request form provided at http://www.ipa.go.jp/english/humandev/icd.html.

Task Dictionary	Skill Dictionary
Task Layer 1 (Task Layer 2)	Skill Classification	Skill Item	Associated Knowledge Items
Formulation of IT adoption plan (IT strategy formulation and execution promotion)	System strategy planning methods	Information system strategy	ASP (Application Service Provider) BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) IT portfolio model IT industry trends (cases) IT management capability index IT investment management EA (Enterprise Architecture) Knowledge related to cross license agreement Control framework System owner System lifecycle System structure System architecture knowledge (functional decomposition of hardware/software/manual work, hardware architecture, software architecture, application architecture, IS plan) Knowledge related to software agreement Data owner Balance score card BPM (Business Process Management) Business process re-engineering (BPR) Business process notation methods Business model Business environment analysis methods Process framework Benchmarking Knowledge related to license agreement Risk analysis techniques Act against Delay in Payment of Subcontract Proceeds Etc. to Subcontractors Development return on development investment Business operations model Design of business operations Business analysis methods Information systems model Significance and purpose of information system strategy Information systems strategy implementation management Information systems strategy evaluation Computerization promotion system Computerization investment planning Product knowledge and trends (cases) Total optimization planning Quality control (Quality control framework)

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10 Key Roles

Both SFIA and the e-CF have described profiles (similar to roles) for providing examples of skill sets (skill combinations) for various roles. The iCD has described tasks performed in EIT and associating those with skills in the IPA database.

The following roles are common to ITSM.

• Enterprise Architect
• Service Portfolio Manager
• Service Catalog Manager
• Business Relationship Manager

11 Standards

ISO 15704:2000, Industrial automation systems – Requirements for enterprise-reference architectures and methodologies

ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2011, Systems and software engineering – Architecture description

TOGAF® Version 9.1, available at http://www.opengroup.org/togaf/downloads

12 References

[1] L. Fehskens, “Why We Can’t Agree on What “Enterprise Architecture” Means, and Why That’s OK, At Least for Now,” Enterprise Architecture Conference Europe, London June 2013.

[2] ISO/IEC/IEEE, “ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2011, Systems and software engineering — Architecture description,” http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=50508

[3] Federation of EA Professional Organizations (FEAPO), “Common Perspectives on Enterprise Architecture,” Architecture and Governance Magazine, Issue 9-4, November 2013, pp.11-17.

[4] M. Porter, “The Five Competitive Forces that Shape Strategy,” Harvard Business Review, January 2008, pp. 79-83.

[5] J. Lapalme, “Three Schools of Thought on Enterprise Architecture,” IT Professional, vol.14, no. 6, pp. 37-43, Nov.-Dec. 2012, doi:10.1109/MITP.2011.109.

[6] N. Malik, “Three Schools of Thought for Enterprise Architecture,” blog, 28 May 2012; http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nickmalik/archive/2012/05/28/three-schools-of-thought-for-enterprise-architecture.aspx

[7] J. Zachman, “A Framework for Information Systems Architecture,” IBM Systems Journal, vol 26, no 3, 1987, IBM Publication G321-5298.

[8] The Open Group (January 23, 2015),“A Historical Look at Enterprise Architecture with John Zachman” http://blog.opengroup.org/2015/01/23/a-historical-look-at-enterprise-architecture-with-john-zachman/

[9] The Open Group (2011),“TOGAF 9.1, Part 11: Architecture Development Method (ADM) — Preliminary Phase” http://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf9-doc/arch/chap05.html

[10] Enterprise Architecture Framework, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_architecture_framework

[11] This image is copyright John A. Zachman and Zachman International®, Inc. Published with the permission of John A. Zachman and Zachman International®, Inc., www.zachman.com

[12] J. van’t Wout et al, “The Integrated Architecture Framework Explained,” Springer-Verlag, 2010.

[13] Dekker, Morsink & Partners, http://www.dekkermorsink.nl/raamwerken.htm

[14] The Open Group, TOGAF9.1 ADM Steps Reference Card

[15] C. Fine, “Clockspeed,” Perseus Books, 1998.

13 Additional Reading

Schekkerman, “How to Survive in the Jungle of Enterprise Architecture Frameworks,” Trafford

Ross Weill and Robertson, “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy,” Harvard Business School Press.