Enterprise Architecture

It's interesting, at least to me, to get a sense for all the different definitions of enterprise architecture out there. So, over time, I will post other people's definitions of enterprise architecture (and their sources) as I run across them in the literature, blogs, and websites. Updated March 9, 2006.

Good Enterprise Architecture:

• Improves internal communications by providing a common language for describing how technology can support business initiatives.
• Helps companies link business and IT priorities by creating road maps for decisionmaking about technology initiatives.
• Helps reduce costs by encouraging technology standards throughout the organization, thus allowing IT to pinpoint trade-offs in project costs based on adherence to architectural requirements.
• Improves the quality of technology initiatives for business by easily explaining plans to a broad range of constituents.

Poor Enterprise Architecture:

• Enforces the use of technical terms and jargon that confuse both business and IT.
• Creates such a high level of detail for defining technology initiatives that decisionmaking is paralyzed.
• Requires a level of standardization that can potentially limit business-unit flexibility and speed to market.
• Has unrealistic goals for transition to new corporate technologies.

CIO Insight magazine (website), "Enterprise Architecture Fact Sheet"

Enterprise Architecture is an infrastructure and a set of Machines constructed in order to manage a chaotic, dynamic, unpredictable, complex, organic, prone to error, frustrating, Enterprise IT, which has to support an ever increasing, dynamic portfolio of products and services, through constant "ASAP, Now, Right-Away" modifications of business processes.

Muli Koppel, Muli Koppel's Blog, published February 22, 2006

Enterprise architecture (EA) refers to the manner in which the operations, systems, and technology components of a business are organized and integrated. It defines many of the standards and structures of these components and is a critical aspect of allowing capabilities and their supporting applications to develop independently while all work together as part of an end-to-end solution. An EA consists of several compenent architectures which often go by different names. Some of the common ones are: business/functional architecture; data/information architecture; applications/systems architecture; infrastructure/technology architecture; operations and execution architecture.

John Schmidt, David Lyle, Integration Competency Center: An Implementation Methodology, 2005, Informatica Corporation. Posted January 29, 2006.

Enterprise Architecture