Enterprise Architecture

The field of Enterprise Architecture (EA) has gained considerable attention over the last of years. The understanding of the term Enterprise Architecture is diverse in both practitioner and scientific communities. Regarding the term architecture most agree on the ANSI/IEEE Standard 1471-2000, where architecture is defined as the “fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution”. For Enterprise Architecture the focus is on the overall enterprise. In contrast to traditional architecture management approaches such as IT architecture, software architecture or IS architecture, EA explicitly incorporates “pure” business-related artifacts in addition to traditional IS/IT artifacts.

EA is important because organisations need to adapt increasingly fast to changing customer requirements and business goals. This need influences the entire chain of activities of an enterprise, from business processes to IT support. Moreover, a change in a particular architecture may influence other architectures. For example, when a new product is introduced, business processes for production, sales and after-sales need to be adapted. It might be necessary to change applications, or even adapt the IT infrastructure. Each of these fields will have its own architectures. To keep the enterprise architecture coherent and aligned with the business goals, the relations between these different architectures must be explicit, and a change should be carried through methodically in all architectures.