Green Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture is about strategy execution. The book "Enterprise Architecture as Strategy - Creating a Foundation for Business Execution" from Jeanne Ross and Peter Weill @MIT is a timeless classic on this topic.

In the last two years the importance of digital to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goal has become clear. "Digital Sustainability" made it to the top of the agenda for the big consulting firms, system integrators and software vendors with big investment to build up capabilities being done. So what role can Enterprise Architecture play to achieve our sustainability goals?

Sustainability is in many organisation a new strategic topic that is reflected in existing strategies, like business, digital, supply chain, .... or create as a strategy in its own right. As Enterprise Architecture is a tool for strategy execution. "GreenEA" is not yet a term used, but as GreenIT and GreenBPM are accepted terms already, why not GreenEA? There is currently an issue with greenwashing, so from an EA perspective we need to be careful to use GreenEA not only as a marketing spiel to get attention and make money, but actually think through how EA can specifically help with achieving sustainability goals and objectives.

From a domain architecture perspective the Supply Chain Sustainability Framework presented at the HICSS-56 provides some interesting ideas as it is inspired by RAMI 4.0 (Reference Architecture Manufacturing Industry 4.0). The solution layers presented there can be aligned with the architecture content framework in TOGAF, although it is missing some of the very architecture-specific component of the TOGAF Content Framework.

This article will be look at sustainability from the perspective of different architecture domains (Business, Information, Application, Infrastructure) with each architecture domain being covered by a separate article. Please leave your comment here, ping me via LinkedIn message or send me an e-mail to [email protected].