Enterprise Architecture - Part.1

The business ecosystem is getting everyday more complex and your company has to transform itself to thriving the future. Change management (meant here as “agile” existence) is the form of competition for startups and legacy companies. Technology is introducing new business models; customers have higher expectations and regulations are changing fast.

So how can your enterprise keep up with the changes coming from different perspectives? A very helpful tool would be ideally something like a circuital representation, a live detailed picture showing how your whole business is structured and how is supported financially and technologically. That is the so-called “Enterprise Architecture” or EA.

EA is a conceptual framework that describes how the business is constructed. There are several reasons to be sure about the fact that enterprise architecting is a useful tool that allow businessmen, managers and IT specialists to draw and/or to read the exact state of art from the enterprise business and IT points of view: Innovation, Monitoring, Maintenance, Change and much more.

There are millions of EA definition, let me define it as easy as I can: EA is a way of modeling the set of the enterprise processes, contents and structures and their relationships. This leads to the simplification of the enterprise structure and to an easy form to show how the whole machine works.

As for an architect drawing the structure of a building, the business architect is the responsible of representing the enterprise “framework”, specifying for all the layers: content, processes and organization structure. In most of the cases, this role is partially or fully covered by the enterprise business manager, supported by IT architecture specialists and/or project managers.

Take any business. It has many parts like prices, products, data, people, technologies and many more. These pods have to somehow work together to create and added value so that the customer will buy whatever the business is selling and the business will become profitable.

How you understand how these parts fit together that's the focus of enterprise architecture that is a conceptual framework that describes how the business is constructed, identifies the primary components and shows the relationship between these.

Since business models keep changing (due to the necessity of being market-adaptable) and the technology progresses, change management needs to be supported by clear current pictures, as only EA can do. Following a top-down listing, EA has four main architectural layers:

1.    Business Architecture

2.    Application Architecture

3.    Data Architecture

4.    Technology Architecture

Other Domains:

- Security

- Compliance