Ideally, you have a blueprint of your enterprise (company, department) that identifies the business processes in place, technology used, data and data flows, hardware infrastructure and applications deployed.
If you need to introduce a change to the organization (according to strategic plan or based on legislative changes) the blueprint immediately shows you the impact of the change across organization. Similarly a review of deployed software application would show the interactions of this software with other applications, business processes and users.
The purpose of enterprise architecture is to optimize across the entire organization the often fragmented legacy of processes (both manual and automated) into an integrated environment that is responsive to change and supportive of the delivery of business strategies.
The advantages that result from a good enterprise architecture include:
Creating a good Enterprise Architecture is not an easy task. Quite often organizations are forced to initiate some form when faced with requirements to upgrade core IT systems to newer versions, or as a result of expansions, or other major changes within organizations. It is at this point that the lack of knowledge of the state of business and IT significantly raises the projects risks and cost, as there are too many unknown factors to consider. For example, not knowing who is using a particular application, what databases are providing and retrieving information from this application and how often can drive business costs up. Likewise, not knowing what will happen if data structure is changed, if there are legislative or compliance requirements for the way the data is processed and the consequences of processing a particular data batch on a different day of the week are integral to making decisions.
Develop Target Architecture, including:
Once you know where you want to be and how to get there, you can utilize the project, program and portfolio management to make sure organizational goals and objectives are achieved as planned.
Enterprise Architecture is a continuous process. Once you make an iteration or portion of it, your current state changes, you adjust the target state if needed, you react to changes in the environment and identify new opportunities. Therefore, the Enterprise Architecture cycle continues bringing all the benefits faster as you can now reuse resources already identified and defined in previous iterations.
We can work with you on identifying the best way to implement the Enterprise Architecture to train your employees and work directly to ensure you achieve the benefits quicker.
