6 Questions for Understanding Enterprise Architecture

Many companies are implementing enterprise architecture these years. IT employees or “senior” IT employees are upgraded to the “shining” title of “Enterprise Architect.” Is it true that Enterprise Architect is just another rank name in deciding the seniority of employees or is it something really creating benefit for a company?

The best way to find out all these answers is to understand what is Enterprise Architecture.  

Wait a minute. I am not going to start writing massive content about the definitions, theories, and so on. Instead, I will list the key questions that one should ask about Enterprise Architecture. How about the answers? Well, they are in wiki pages, google results, books, presentations, and most important of all, your own analysis and judgements.

1. To understand Enterprise Architecture, the first question is “what is Enterprise Architecture?” Or, one could start even one step back. What is “Enterprise?” Is it a multi-nation corporation or the IT department or a whole business division? And what is “architecture” or what is “IT architecture?”

2.  Why do we need Enterprise Architecture? Of course we know that it is about fulfilling the business requirements. But there can be different ways of solving business requirements. Why do so many of us choose to use the EA approach?

3. When talking about IT architecture or software architecture, many books and articles mentioned about different levels or levels of abstraction. For example, there can be business architecture, solution architecture, reference architecture, data or information architecture, operation architecture, technology architecture, etc. What are the right ways of understanding these levels? How are they connected?

4. Are there any existing concepts, frameworks, guidelines, and systems about Enterprise Architecture (oh yes, there’s plenty and more coming). What are their differences?

5. How about a short history of Enterprise Architecture? Why did we come to this era that we all need the EA. What was it before? How did enterprise IT evolve over the past many years? Besides the history, how’s the progress and new topics in this discipline? Where do I get the latest trend and what are the trend now?

6. What about the business case for implementing Enterprise Architecture? How and why did so many companies accept to implement EA?

OK. Enough about the questions. Here are two exercises if all the above questions are answered.

E1. Consider IT systems and solutions as an commodity is a natural way to implement cost-saving for any enterprise. More and more companies are seeing the need of using "out of the box" software rather than self- developing IT systems as a "piece of art" which can only serve specific purposes. In parallel to this, we have been seeing the new evolution of IT software that enables simple and quick customizations which makes a standard software quickly fit well into an organization with a compromise between the end-users "never satisfied needs", the business sponsors' "cost-reduction while shorter time-to-market demand focus" and the IT technicians' "quality and easy to maintenance awareness”. Providing this scenario (which is very typical in companies), how is EA’s role in such a situation? How should EA solve or resolve or manage such scenarios?

E2. Many companies consider cost-saving and EA is a great area to focus on cost-saving. But is this enough? How about getting more profit? Can we use EA to gain profit for the company?