An enterprise, organised for a particular purpose, will be more assured of successful delivery if:
- The characteristics and capabilities of its people and resources are understood and applied to their best advantage
- Processes can be broken down into constituent parts and made more efficient
- Problems can be consistently analysed and solutions developed from reusable and composable tools and materials
- Decisions can be made using consistent measurements and evaluation frameworks.
To achieve this systematically, we must make use of a classification framework for descriptions and an approach or methodology, that facilitates their use in designs, to produce an enterprise architecture. The Zachman framework and the TOGAF content framework are two classification systems that have been fruitfully used across diverse industries, and the general principles of both are an instructive guide that can inform architecture description without the necessity to invest in their methodologies entirely.
From this perspective, an enterprise architecture is composed of dependent layers, domains, that can be defined to greater or lesser detail throughout, as is beneficial to the priorities at hand. Its purpose is a common understanding of the enterprise in order to improve efficiency and assure its success, through better decision making.
- Enterprise strategy provides the driving purpose (principles and policies applied to achieve the expected benefits)
- Architecture standards and principles are set and defined to support that purpose
- Functional (or business) architecture describes the capabilities/functions of the enterprise
- Information architecture describes the meaning of the data that it uses
- Data architecture described the entities that are important to the enterprise and their relationships to each other
- Technology architecture describes the tools and solutions/systems that are used to support the capabilities/functions
- Infrastructure architecture describes the way the technology architecture is implemented and linked together
This layered architecture can be used to describe any enterprise in any industry. All layers are relevant but to a different extent depending on a particular industry’s domain. Understanding their interdependency and aligning them according to targets for efficacy and efficiency is the first goal of any effort to define an enterprise’s architecture and the first step towards analysing where and what changes are required to better effect its purpose.
By stipulating the current architecture and using it to articulate deficiencies in its alignment with (support for) the functional architecture layer, the enterprise architect can design a future architecture and any transition states that might be required to achieve an improved alignment. In turn these assets provide the ‘blue print’ design used when planning investment and implementing changes to the enterprise.