What Is Enterprise Acrhitecture Essay -- Information Technology Essays

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 an organisation's data assets. †¢ Applications. This provides an overview for the individual application systems to be deployed, their interactions, and their relationships to the business processes of the organization. †¢ Technology. This describes the logical software and hardware that are required to support the deployment of business, data, and application services. This includes IT infrastructure, networks, communications, processing, etc. It is can be used to get the current view of the business process and also where the business wants to go and how to get there. It can be viewed as city planning for IT covering the overall business processes and IT assets, how they're used, and how they should be built. What Impact could it have on the business? A strong Enterprise Architecture process helps to answer basic questions like: What are the organization's business processes, and how is IT supporting those processes? In general, the essential reasons for developing an Enterprise... ...requirements of an organization. †¢ The required IS and business capabilities to achieve these requirements. It is important to include all relationships with external entities to help ensure proper integration with their systems. †¢ Required changes within the organization this. This includes identifying the gaps between where you are and where you want to be. Once agreement has been reached that this is right for the company and backing received for the key stakeholders the company then needs to: †¢ Agree priorities for delivery. This needs to be planned in manageable stages to accommodate the company’s capacity to handle change. The company should also keep in mind the dependencies between one system and another or the possibility to run systems in parallel during the change over. †¢ Develop the required solutions. †¢ Agree standards. †¢ Evolve solutions.