Enterprise Architecture is the practice of applying a comprehensive and rigorous method for describing a current and/or future structure and behaviour for an organization's processes, information systems, personnel and organizational sub-units, so that they align with the organization's core goals and strategic direction. Although often associated strictly with information technology, it relates more broadly to the practice of Business Optimization in that it addresses business architecture, performance management and process architecture as well.

Enterprise Architecture is becoming a common practice within the U.S. Federal Government as part of the Capital Planning and Investment Control (CPIC) process. The Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) reference models serve as a framework to guide Federal Agencies in the development of their architectures. The primary purpose of creating an enterprise architecture is to ensure that business strategy and IT investments are aligned. As such, enterprise architecture allows traceability from the business strategy down to the underlying technology.

Companies such as BP, Intel and Volkswagen AG also have applied Enterprise Architecture to improve their business architectures as well in order to improve business performance and productivity.

Enterprise architecture methodology

The practice of Enterprise Architecture involves developing an architecture framework to describe a series of "current", "intermediate" and "target" reference architectures and applying them to align programmes of change. These frameworks detail the organizations, roles, entities and relationships that exist or should exist to perform a set of business processes. This framework will provide a rigorous taxonomy and ontology that clearly identifies what processes a business performs and detailed information about how those processes are executed. The end product is a set of artifacts that describe in varying degrees of detail exactly what and how a business operates and what resources are required. These artifacts are often graphical.

Given these descriptions, whose levels of detail will vary according to affordability and other practical considerations, decision makers are provided the means to make informed decisions about where to invest resources, where to realign organizational goals and processes, and what policies and procedures will support core missions or business functions.

A strong Enterprise Architecture process helps to answer basic questions like:

• Is the current architecture supporting and adding value to the organization?
• How might an architecture be modified so that it adds more value to the organization?
• Based on what we know about what the organization wants to accomplish in the future, will the current architecture support or hinder that?

Implementing enterprise architecture generally starts with documenting the organization's strategy and other necessary details such as where and how it operates. The process then cascades down to documenting discrete core competencies, business processes, and how the organization interacts with itself and with external parties such as customers, suppliers, and government entities.

Having documented the organization's strategy and structure, the architecture process then flows down into the discrete information technology components such as:

• Organization charts, activities, and process flows of how the IT Organization operates
• Organization cycles, periods and timing
• Suppliers of technology hardware, software, and services
• Applications and software inventories and diagrams
• Interfaces between applications - that is: events, messages and data flows
• Intranet, Extranet, Internet, eCommerce, EDI links with parties within and outside of the organization
• Databases and supporting data models
• Hardware, platforms, and hosting: servers, and where they are kept
• Local and wide area networks, Internet connectivity diagrams

Wherever possible, all of the above should be related explicitly to the organization's strategy, goals, and operations. The Enterprise architecture will document the current state of the technical components listed above, as well as an ideal-world desired future state (Reference Architecture) and finally a "Target" future state which is the result of engineering tradeoffs and compromises vs. the ideal. Essentially the result is a nested and interrelated set of models, usually managed and maintained with specialised software available on the market.

Such exhaustive mapping of IT dependencies has notable overlaps with both Metadata in the general IT sense, and with the ITIL concept of the Configuration Management Database. Maintaining the accuracy of such data can be a significant challenge.

Along with the models and diagrams goes a set of best practices aimed at securing adaptability, scalability, manageability etc. These systems engineering best practices are not unique to Enterprise Architecture but are essential to its success nonetheless. They involve such things as componentization, asynchronous communication between major components, standardization of key identifiers and so on.

Successful application of Enterprise Architecture requires appropriate positioning in the organization. The analogy of city-planning is often invoked in this connection, and is instructive.

An intermediate outcome of an architecture process is a comprehensive inventory of business strategy, business processes, organizational charts, technical inventories, system and interface diagrams, and network topologies, and the explicit relationships between them. The inventories and diagrams are merely tools that support decision making. But this is not sufficient. It must be a living process.

The organization must design and implement a process that ensures continual movement from the current state to the future state. The future state will generally be a combination of one or more:

• Closing gaps that are present between the current organization strategy and the ability of the IT organization to support it
• Closing gaps that are present between the desired future organization strategy and the ability of the IT organization to support it
• Necessary upgrades and replacements that must be made to the IT architecture based on supplier viability, age and performance of hardware and software, capacity issues, known or anticipated regulatory requirements, and other issues not driven explicitly by the organization's functional management.

On a regular basis, the current state and future state are redefined to account for evolution of the architecture, changes in organizational strategy, and purely external factors such as changes in technology and customer/vendor/government requirements.

Relationship to other IT disciplines

Enterprise architecture is a key component of the Information technology governance process at any organization of significant size. More and more companies are implementing a formal enterprise architecture process to support the governance and management of IT. However, as noted in the opening paragraph of this article it ideally relates more broadly to the practice of Business Optimization in that it addresses business architecture, performance management and process architecture as well. Enterprise Architecture is also related to IT portfolio management and Metadata in the enterprise IT sense.

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