Developing An Enterprise Level Architectural Description
Paramount to the enterprise architecture is the identification of the sponsor, his/her mission, vision and strategy and the governance framework to define all roles, responsibilities and relationships involved in the anticipated transition.
Enterprise architects use various methods and tools to capture the structure and dynamics of an enterprise. In doing so, they produce taxonomies, diagrams, documents and models, together called artifacts. These artifacts describe the logical organization of business functions, business capabilities, business processes, people, information resources, business systems, software applications, computing capabilities, information exchange and communications infrastructure within the enterprise.
A collection of these artifacts, sufficiently complete to describe the enterprise in useful ways, is considered by EA practitioners an 'enterprise' level architectural description, or enterprise architecture, for short. The UK National Computing Centre EA best practice guidance states
Normally an EA takes the form of a comprehensive set of cohesive models that describe the structure and functions of an enterprise.
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The individual models in an EA are arranged in a logical manner that provides an ever-increasing level of detail about the enterprise: its objectives and goals; its processes and organization; its systems and data; the technology used and any other relevant spheres of interest.
This is the definition of enterprise architecture implicit in several EA frameworks including the popular TOGAF architectural framework.
An enterprise architecture framework bundles tools, techniques, artifact descriptions, process models, reference models and guidance used by architects in the production of enterprise-specific architectural description. Several enterprise architecture frameworks break down the practice of enterprise architecture into a number of practice areas or domains.
See the related articles on enterprise architecture frameworks and domains for further information.
In 1992, Steven Spewak described a process for creating an enterprise architecture that is widely used in educational courses.
Read more about this topic: Enterprise Architecture
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