Everything you need to know about Enterprise Architecture (EA)

In this article, we will define Enterprise Architecture and why is it essential to navigate the complexity of enterprise transformation, the role of the Enterprise Architect, and the main use cases for EA. You'll also find information on how to implement Enterprise Architecture: which frameworks, models and diagrams are useful, what are the benefits of the software solutions dedicated to EA, and what should be the implementation strategy for EA practices.

What's enterprise architecture: definition and goals

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a practice that aims to align the strategy and the operating model of an organization. Enterprise Architecture outlines how an enterprise should organize and operate to achieve its objectives. As such, EA provides a blueprint to support the transformation of the enterprise - it is a journey and not a one-off project.

EA provides methods to describe a complete vision of the organization to analyze and design it, then plan and implement its evolution. This completeness is ensured by 4 major architecture layers:

• Business architecture: to describe the company's strategy and the services offered, as well as the organization and the business capabilities required to deliver the services
• Application architecture: to understand which applications and systems support the processes and services delivered, as well as their interactions
• Data architecture: to document the organization's data assets, data flows and helps ensure data is managed properly to support business needs
• Technology architecture: to identify the technologies (software and hardware) that support the applications and data, and understand how they are deployed

Each concept is therefore specific to a layer but it can be linked to concepts from other layers (e.g. a business capability may be supported by one or several applications, each of them relying on numerous technologies) and it's precisely the analysis of these relationships that enables identifying the impact of change. For example: what happens if a server deployed in the organization goes down? What would be the consequences for the business?

This impact analysis will help identify risks and anticipate problems, helping to better design and plan the transformation of the company.

Thus, the principal value of EA is its ability to provide recommendations to business and IT teams to adapt current processes and IT assets ensuring they are aligned with the company's strategy.

Why enterprise architecture is important

With the emergence of new technologies, information systems are getting more and more complex, heterogeneous, and costly for organizations. It's becoming more and more difficult to make these new technologies evolve easily so that they remain adapted to the needs of the company.

Enterprise Architecture makes it possible to implement actions to reduce the risks generated by these drifts and offers more concretely the following benefits:

• Provide a common vision of the organization
• Reduce IT complexity and facilitate the evolution of Information Systems
• Reduce IT costs by removing redundancies and breaking the organizational silos
• Reduce technology risk
• Improve collaboration between business and IT teams
• Align IT investments, business resources, and organization to the company's strategy
• Facilitate compliance with regulations
• Build organizational resilience
• Ensure system interoperability
• Standardize practices and processes

Many companies don't understand the importance of Enterprise Architecture to support their business objectives. They focus mainly on building their Information Systems, without designing the organization as a whole. Therefore, they lack visibility on the strong dependencies existing between the business and IT. Information Systems built in that way are hard to maintain and have poor scalability.

But organizations' complexity and the constant evolutions required by the business, explain why the use of an enterprise architecture practice is essential to successfully adapt to change. If you are renovating a house, without changing its foundations, you can probably do so without an architect. However, if your goal is to revise the structure of the house, which will require considering electrical plans, the water supply, and the load-bearing walls... the success of your project will require an architect.

The role of an Enterprise Architect

Enterprise architects are in charge of analyzing operating models (structures, processes, resources...) to ensure that they effectively and efficiently align with business goals. Enterprise architects must also ensure that these structures and processes are agile and durable, allowing them to adapt quickly and withstand major change. Typically, they report to the CIO or other IT managers and go on to work as a CTO, software engineer, development director, or CIOs.

An undergraduate degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field, as well as at least 10 years of experience in IT or a related field, are required to become an enterprise architect. You should also have hands-on experience with computer systems, mainframes, and other architecture technology. To be successful, enterprise architects must have a variety of soft skills, including communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, leadership, and teamwork.

Who are the different stakeholders of EA

An enterprise architecture practice may encompass many roles:

• Enterprise Architects: provide architecture services that transform the operating model to align with strategy
• Portfolio Managers: responsible for maintaining and rationalizing application or technology portfolios
• Business Architects: define business models and capability models, and ensure that value streams are aligned with customer expectations and journeys
• Solution Architects: design technology solutions to meet business needs, typically at the application, service, and infrastructure levels
• Security Architects: verify that newly designed architectures comply with the organization's security policy
• Business Analysts: refine and optimize processes for general improvements or regulatory reasons, as well as define candidates for automation
• Chief Data Officer/Information Architects: manage and design where data and information are used, moved, or stored across the enterprise and support intelligence, regulatory, privacy, and data science activities
• Risk/Compliance Managers: responsible for assessing risk exposure and regulatory compliance of the current or future state of the enterprise

CIO (Chief Information Officer) and CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) are often the main sponsors of Enterprise Architecture in the organization.

How EA can help these different positions

For each of these roles, Enterprise Architecture provides answers to their specific questions:

(People with IT focus)

• Solution Architect: How should I integrate a new solution into the existing IT landscape? What are the authorized technologies in the company? Should I deploy this application in the cloud or on-premise?
• Security Architect: Does the new solution respect the security principles? What are the threats and vulnerabilities of each application?
• Developer: Which microservices should I leverage? What are the current application integrations?
• CTO (Chief Technology Officer): What is the technology roadmap? What are the risks coming from technology obsolescence? How do I mitigate these risks?
• CIO: How can we prioritize our IT investments to support the company's strategic priorities? How should we transform our IT landscape? In which application should we invest? Which applications should be removed? What is the IT roadmap? What is the cost of our IT landscape and how can we reduce IT costs?

(People with Business Focus)

• Business Analyst: Which applications support this process? How should we automate this process?
• Risk Officer: What are the risks on IT assets (cybersecurity, compliance)?

To get the right answers to all these questions, EA must be properly implemented beforehand. This implementation can be tedious without guidance, which is why Enterprise Architecture frameworks can then help accelerate the implementation of an Enterprise Architecture practice.

Enterprise architecture frameworks

An enterprise architecture framework is a set of structures, processes, and tools that supports the management and implementation of an enterprise architecture. The framework ensures consistency and reliability, it can be a real accelerator for people who want to set up an Enterprise Architecture practice quickly, without spending too much time on the definition of each concept and their relationships.

The framework structure is often hierarchical, based on the four layers: strategy, business, application, and technology.

There are many Enterprise Architecture Frameworks, but some popular frameworks include the pioneer of EA methodology the Zachman, the most popular one TOGAF (The Open Group Framework), and ArchiMate.

The Zachman Framework is the go-to for the classification of descriptive representations that constitute the enterprise architecture. The classification uses the six primitives to describe these models.

Then the Open Group created TOGAF, which is currently in its tenth version. This model uses a cyclical approach to the development of architecture.

ArchiMate is a notation that has been validated and adopted by The Open Group as an architecture notation supporting TOGAF. The Archimate framework breaks down systems into active structures, passive structures, or behaviors.

Frameworks are useful for companies that are starting an enterprise architecture practice but they quickly show their limits as maturity grows.

Frameworks tend to favor an academic approach that is not sufficiently focused on delivering results quickly in line with business expectations.

In many organizations, EA teams focusing on specific use cases such as application portfolio rationalization, cloud migration, or the introduction of new products/services are often most recognized than those that try to apply a framework in a more or less academic way.

Enterprise Architecture models and diagrams

EA aims to describe all the different perspectives of an organization to understand, analyze, and transform it. Modeling is key to describe this complexity simply and communicate it to all stakeholders. Modeling is necessary to understand complex systems, from multiple perspectives, it is also a perfect solution to communicate with non-expert people.

Architecture relies on models and diagrams to address several key objectives:

For Enterprise Architecture:

• Business motivation model to represent the enterprise strategy and visualize enterprise objectives
• Business Model Canvas to get a high-level, comprehensive view of the strategic items required to successfully bring a product to market
• Business capability maps to get a clear understanding of the enterprise's capabilities and how they are supported by IT assets
• Customer journey map to understand how customers interact with the organization and their satisfaction level
• Process/Value stream maps to visualize how products and services are delivered and analyze the value delivered to customers
• Enterprise transformation roadmap and IT roadmap to visualize and communicate how business and IT projects are planned over time.

For Solution Architecture:

• Solution environment model to define the integration of the solution in the existing IT landscape
• Application deployment model to describe how technical components of an application must be deployed to avoid potential pitfalls
• Technical infrastructure map to describe the technical infrastructure required to support the deployed solution

Main use cases and examples for Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture's scope is wide and covers multiple use cases that aim to help decision-makers manage different types of changes.

1/ Manage IT landscape

EA practices help IT departments to manage and transform the IT assets of the organization by bringing visibility, impact analysis, and recommendations for two main use cases:

• Application rationalization is one of the key use cases of Enterprise Architecture. The objective is to analyze the current IT landscape to detect functional redundancies, identify optimizations to be done, and reduce costs. By providing clear visibility of existing applications, their functional scope (the link with the Business Capabilities), and their costs, EA provides insights for application rationalization.
• Technology management defines technology standards (technologies that can be used in the organization), establishes processes to evaluate and acquire technologies, and mitigates the risk of obsolescence by managing application and technology lifecycles and detects potential conflicts.

2/ Plan and execute transformation

Transformation can be led by major organizational changes, such as mergers and acquisitions but also by the introduction of a new product/service, or simply by the modernization of the IT landscape like moving to the cloud or shifting from a monolith architecture to microservices. EA supports business transformation through the following use cases:

• IT strategic planning: ensure the alignment between business needs and IT investments
• Business efficiency improvement: by providing a vision of how applications support processes, EA helps business analysts get a better understanding of why some processes are not performing as expected or are failing to match customers' expectations
• Cloud migration: EA provides insights to define the best cloud migration strategy by identifying which applications should be migrated to the cloud and how
• Solution architecture defines the required architecture for a new IT solution from different perspectives (business, functional, application, technical, and security)
• EA can also contribute to providing benchmarks

3/ Build resiliency

To establish the most sustainable outcomes, organizations can best support enterprise and data governance by bringing all risk management functions together.

• Support the CISO on the IT compliance use case, by providing an up-to-date IT inventory and regulatory controls, to help run regular compliance checks
• Support the risk manager on a Business Continuity Planning use case, by providing a ready-to-use process and application inventory to base business impact analysis upon
• Data governance: EA helps understand the context in which data is used and for what purposes (applications and processes) to improve data quality and ensure data compliance

The importance of Enterprise architecture tools

The two basic tools used for corporate architectural planning are Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. However, these tools often can't meet the objectives of an enterprise architecture practice for complex contexts. Other more robust third-party tools and software can assist you in developing advanced Enterprise Architecture strategies.

EA software that provides a single repository help facilitates communication and alignment across the organization, and enterprise layers speed up routine tasks that take up the architect's time and provides data-driven insights to make decisions quickly and confidently.

EA tools also provide modeling capabilities, allowing architects to design all models and diagrams needed for their work. These results can be shared within the organization through collaboration features such as workflows, alerts, and notifications. Indeed, it is necessary to involve more people in the whole EA process because maintaining an EA repository requires the collaboration of everyone.

EA tools automate and accelerate value creation for architects, allowing them to focus on the most valuable activities, such as data analysis and architecture definition. Less value activities such as data collection, which can be time-consuming and tedious, can therefore be automated thanks to features such as automatic discovery.

Next-Gen EA solutions also accelerate decisions by providing smart algorithms to automatically analyze the EA repository content and provide data-driven insights, such as recommendations for application rationalization or conflict detection for technology obsolescence management.

Building an Enterprise Architecture practice may be complex and time-consuming. Enterprise Architecture's scope is wide, and many enterprise architects try to boil the ocean too fast. They struggle to demonstrate value to their management and end up unable to renew their budget.

Following a pragmatic approach, based on use-cases and focusing on tangible outcomes, is the recommended way to set up an enterprise architecture practice that quickly provides value to its stakeholders (e.g. visibility on IT assets and business capabilities, first impact analysis...) while developing a strong baseline to support company changes.

Business Capabilities

Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture Framework