THE ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE

The enterprise architecture defines the building blocks that comprise an organization’s overall system architecture and provides a framework into which new applications can be incorporated while maintaining the integrity of the whole. The enterprise architecture can be used to optimize current IT investments and ensure that future investments are aligned with the organization’s business goals and objectives.

The creation of an enterprise architecture is achieved through balancingthe organization’s infrastructure and application architecture needs with business and information requirements, as illustrated in Figure 7.1. The enterprise architecture will typically identify a current state, an anticipated future state, and a plan of coordinated activities to guide an organization from the current state to the desired future state.

Figure 7.1: Influence on an enterprise architecture.

Each of these four perspectives, or inputs, must be considered to create a single, cohesive enterprise architecture view. Ultimately, the value of the enterprise architecture is only realized by balancing the interactions, relationships, and dependencies of these four perspectives. To find the appropriate balance between these disparate perspectives, there inevitably must be give and take and the development of mutual understanding and respect between IT and business stakeholders.

Enterprise Architecture Benefits

Today’s executives know that effectively leveraging valuable information assets using information technology is necessary for achieving business goals and objectives. The enterprise architecture addresses this need by providing a strategic context for the evolution of applications in response to constantly changing business needs and market dynamics. Creating and maintaining an effective enterprise architecture can be a key enabler to achieving competitive advantage and will become an increasingly important requirement for organizational survival.

When developed and maintained as a strategic tool, an enterprise architecture can be leveraged to achieve the following:

• Lower Costs —A well-defined architecture can provide system modularity. Modularity and reuse are important attributes of a streamlined architecture as they enable lower system development, support, and maintenance costs, while also improving system interoperability.

• Increased Flexibility —By defining and maintaining the key touch points between components of the overall architecture, it is possible to increase support for organizational growth and restructuring requirements (for example, mergers and acquisitions). A modular architecture can also be leveraged to increase organizational flexibility, and maintain a firm’s options to build, buy, or outsource systems as needed.

• Improved Time-To-Market —An enterprise architecture can be leveraged to support the rapid deployment of mission-critical business applications, achieving faster time-to-market for new products and services. This, in turn, leads to increased growth and profitability.

• Reduced Complexity —The modularity of an enterprise architecture can reduce the complexities associated with the integration of information across disparate systems, maximizing the visibility and value of the organization’s available information assets.

Once the enterprise architecture has been created, it cannot be left to gather dust or end up at the bottom of a stack of documents. Creation of the enterprise architecture requires an ongoing commitment to updating and maintaining it as business priorities and information needs change over time. Unfortunately, it is not easy to maintain an up-to-date enterprise architecture, especially in recent years as priorities have shifted to e-Commerce storefronts and other e-Business imperatives. In the flurry of activity during the Internet bubble, many organizations allowed their enterprise architecture plans to become outdated. It is therefore important for executives to take a moment to ask themselves whether their enterprise architecture truly reflects the systems and applications they have in place today, and if it is aligned with the strategic needs of the business. It is likely that the answer will be an emphatic “No!”

Today, as IT budgets continue to be trimmed, IT executives are being asked to do more with less. In this environment, the enterprise architecture is once again coming to the forefront, but it is still challenging to maintain an enterprise architecture that balances business’s tactical imperatives and strategic goals—especially with the ever-increasing rate of change and demands on today’s economy.

Today’s Reality

Today’s reality is that most organizations have struggled to maintain an effective enterprise architecture. Over the medium to long term, no one has been able to accurately predict how technology might change and what the implications of those changes might be. As such, enterprise architectures have developed through a combination of best guesses and informed hunches—resulting in an accidental architecture, implemented with an array of heterogeneous hardware and software platforms adhering to their own proprietary standards and protocols. Add to this the tremendous business demands placed on the IT organization, in which “We need that new system yesterday!” is not an uncommon cry. The result has been an environment in which tactical business needs supercede the enterprise architecture plans, forcing organizations into an ad-hoc approach to system implementation with the well-intended goal of folding tactical initiatives into a more cohesive architecture when current pressures and demands stabilize. The reality is that the pressures do not abate, the demands do not stabilize, and the enterprise architecture is lost in the myriad of tactical initiatives. As George Paras and John Zachman, respectively, wrote:

“The wild e-everything ride is over. Budgets are tighter and reality has set in. Executives tell us they must provide a solid, costeffective IT foundation and simultaneously increase flexibility to respond to the increasingly diverse demands of the business. The effective use of information, technology, human resources, and investment capital must be balanced to achieve these goals. The solution is a portfolio focus, a return to disciplined, pragmatic approaches for strategy development and enterprise design, combined with robust processes for managing the enterprise portfolio of programs.” ^{[2 ]}

“[Enterprise] Architecture requires actual work. We keep looking for the ‘quick fix,’ a technological solution, a tool, a package, a new processor, the perennial ‘silver bullet.’ We wish we could simply throw money at the problem and have the pain go away.” ^[3]

Although frustrating and extremely expensive, there was little that organizations could have done to sidestep this issue and avoid the crumbling of their enterprise architectures, other than perhaps consult a crystal ball—and even those have been of limited value of late. Over recent years computer systems, and the applications that run on them, have made huge leaps and bounds, but it has been incredibly difficult to build and maintain a cohesive enterprise architecture.

The cost associated with support, maintenance and integration of heterogeneous architectures has been huge, demanding an ever-greater proportion of the annual IT budget. It is estimated that on average organizations spent $6.3 million on integration projects in 2001 and that this number will rise to $6.4 million in 2003.^[4] So, what can executives do to reduce this level of expenditure while also creating a flexible enterprise architecture that supports the business needs today, as well as the long-term business strategy? The answer is a new architectural paradigm referred to as the Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs).

^{[2 ]}www.meta.com, Quote from Web site, By George Paras, META Group Vice President and Director of Enterprise Planning and Architecture Strategy.

^[3]www.dmreview.com, DM Review, December 1999, “Enterprise Architecture: The Past and the Future” by John A. Zachman.

^[4]Forrester Research, December 2001, “Reducing Integration’s Cost” by Laura Koetzle.