Enterprise Architecture Made Simple

Book excerpt: Learn how to institute and implement enterprise architecture in your organization. You can make a quick start and establish a baseline for your enterprise architecture within ten weeks, then grow and stabilize the architecture over time using the proven Ready, Set, Go Approach. Reading this book will: 1. Give you directions on how to institute and implement enterprise architecture in your organization. You will be able to build close relationships with stakeholders and delivery teams, but you will not need to micromanage the architecture’s operations. 2. Increase your awareness that enterprise architecture is about business, not information technology. 3. Enable you to initiate and facilitate dramatic business development. The architecture of an enterprise must be tolerant of currently unknown business initiatives. 4. Show you how to get a holistic view of the process of implementing enterprise architecture. 5. Make you aware that information is a key business asset and that information architecture is a key part of the enterprise architecture. 6. Allow you to learn from our experiences. This book is based on our 30 years of work in the enterprise architecture field, colleagues in Europe, customer cases, and students. We do not pretend to cover all you need to know about enterprise architecture within these pages. Rather, we give you the information that is most important for effective and successful guidance. Sometimes, less is more. If your company is about to make a major change and you are looking for a way to reduce the changes into manageable pieces—and still retain control of how they fit together—this is your handbook. Maybe you are already acting as an enterprise architect and using a formal method, but you need practical hints. Or maybe you are about to set up an enterprise architect network or group of specialists and need input on how to organize your work. The Ready-Set-Go method for introducing enterprise architecture provides you, the enterprise architect, with an immediate understanding of the basic steps for starting, organizing, and operating the entirety of your organization’s architecture. Chapter 1: Ready shows how to model and analyze your business operations, assess their current status, construct a future scenario, compare it to the current structure, analyze what you see, and show the result in a city plan. Chapter 2: Set deals with preparing for the implementation of the architecture with governance, enterprise architecture organization, staffing, etc. This is the organizing step before beginning the actual work. Chapter 3: Go establishes how to implement a city plan in practice. It deals with the practicalities of working as an enterprise architect and is called the “running” step. The common thread through all aspects of the enterprise architect’s work is the architect’s mastery of a number of tools, such as business models, process models, information models, and matrices. We address how to initiate the architecture process within the organization in such a way that the overarching enterprise architecture and architecture-driven approach can be applied methodically and gradually improved.