Establishing an Enterprise Architecture to support change and decision making within a business should not be undertaken in an ad-hoc manner.
Many businesses will already have significant information that they can feed into an Enterprise Architecture. They should however step back and look at the big picture so that they can choose what to include and what to leave out.
By working systematically through the key dimensions of the business a filter can be applied that will enable the selection of useful information to be included within the Enterprise Architecture whilst dismissing information that would be either a distraction or lead the business into directions it would prefer not to go.
- Mission: Describes what the business stands for and through its vision, principles and standards defines how it wishes to behave and operate
- Goals: Describe what the business needs to achieve in moving towards its vision. Specific objective are defined along with quantitative measures providing an indication of success.
- Strategy: Describes how the business will progress towards achieving its goals and objectives. At the very least there should be a strategy for the business as a whole with accompanying strategies for information and technology
- Capability: Describes what the business can do and what it needs to be able to do in order to realise the various strategies it has developed. In assessing the capabilities gaining an understanding of their maturity (fitness for purpose and efficacy) as well as identifying gaps is paramount.
- Processes: Support the business by describing how things are done. For the business to mature and progress it is essential that these be documented in a consistent manner and published so that all who use them know what it is that should be complying. With documented processes and appropriate measures assigned to them the ability to increase business efficiency is enhanced.
- Technology: Supporting many facets of the business, it is essential that how required functionality has has been realised is well understood. By aligning the applications deployed and the technology sets in use with the strategies, goals and objectives of the ‘whole of business’ the opportunity to rationalise (reducing duplication) and eliminate waste increases.Establishing a detailed technology inventory will support gaining this understanding.
Alignment with Business, Information and Technology strategies also assists with defining a target Technology architecture against which future business initiatives can be shaped.
By first defining the Mission, Goals and Strategies of the business the Enterprise Architecture can subsequently be shaped to provide optimal business benefit.
