The purpose of an enterprise architecture is to bring concrete, measurable benefits to the enterprise by providing insights into its management and operation that guide investment and change. Let us first explore what we mean by ‘enterprise’ and ‘architecture’.
An ‘enterprise’ is usually defined by commercial and social aims and goals, resembling an extremely complex project. It has an organisational hierarchy for decision making, but being defined by its delivery of specific products, it also comprises assets such as capital, liabilities, plant and machinery, processes, and intellectual as well as physical property. The enterprise is tasked with assigning and managing these efficiently in pursuit of its commercial and/or social aims and goals.
An ‘architecture’ is a description and design of components, and the structures into which these can be composed. It is in essence a set of principles and classifications that are applied in order to organise material or ideas, making them reusable and interoperable (composable). The manner in which these are designed and described is driven by a purpose, and that purpose is defined by the enterprise.
Thus, ‘enterprise architecture’ comprises descriptions and designs of the components and systems/structures that are deployed by an enterprise in pursuit of its aims and goals, its purpose. Enterprise architecture in practice can be subdivided into domains:
- Functional (or business) architecture - the description and design of a set of capabilities provided (functions performed) by the enterprise. This may also comprise process architecture which applies the architecture definition approach to describing and designing processes that the business performs during its operations: in essence the detailed implementation of its capabilities
- Information architecture - the description and design, i.e. structuring, of information used in and resulting from processes that the business performs. The information architecture describes how to impart meaning to the data that is consumed and produced
- Data architecture - the description and design of the way data/metrics are grouped to attribute business entities and their relationships to each other. The entities themselves are physical and abstract things that the business recognises as important or instrumental to its purpose
- Technology architecture (or more generally system/solution architecture) - the description and design of the tools that are used by the functional architecture, usually in combination with information, data, and processes
- Infrastructure architecture - the description and design of the way technology is connected together and implemented
This list could be viewed with a top down or bottom up dependency but it is imperative for the enterprise to ensure alignment between these domains. The relative scope of each will vary between industries but each will be a part of their composition to some extent.