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Enterprise Architecture (EA) management practice has matured significantly over the past few years. During this period of time EA practitioners have also matured their understanding of their needs and requirements for EA products to support their management practice. EA experts acknowledge the need for a broader range of capabilities in today's EA solutions. Having an active, actionable, picture of the enterprise at the fingertips of leaders throughout the business is the gold standard for EA. This implies that information must be gathered from a wide variety of people, systems, and locations, assembled into a validated whole, and available to all authorised users anytime they want it. This is quite different than the days of EA being a couple of architects in the back-office writing some documents, creating PowerPoint's, and working with desktop modeling tools. In order to accomplish today's EA needs, a reference enterprise meta-model is selected or constructed. The meta-model provides a standard for identifying the critical information the enterprise needs to know about, manage, and leverage. Enterprise knowledge in the form of structured, unstructured, and free form collaborations is then assembled into a centralized knowledge repository according to the rules of the meta-model. This implies the need for integration with data sources, stake-holders assigned responsibility to populate and ensure currency of information, automation of data quality review processes, and backup of this critical information. Navigational tools must be provided for users to
examine EA information but more importantly, analytical tools must be provided
in order to leverage EA information, hence, next generation EA has a strong
aspect of business intelligence over a quality base of knowledge about the
current enterprise. Analysis typically takes on two focus paths,
cost/efficiency and strategic direction. In the first case, EA information is
utilised, for example, to determine if platform consolidation for cost savings
is possible or if reduction of applications is possible and the impact of such
actions. In the latter case, EA information is utilised to examine potential
scenarios for increasing business value and if a barrier exists to achieving
such a scenario. Clearly, there are an infinite number of uses for EA
information, and enterprises are recognizing the value of having an active, up
to date, repository of critical enterprise information that can be leveraged
at-will by various persons in the business. |
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