Enterprise Architecture

“Enterprise architecture (EA) is a business function concerned with the structures and behaviours of a business, especially business roles and processes that create and use business data. The international definition according to the Federation of Enterprise Architecture Professional Organizations is ‘a well-defined practice for conducting enterprise analysis, design, planning, and implementation, using a comprehensive approach at all times, for the successful development and execution of strategy. Enterprise architecture applies architecture principles and practices to guide organizations through the business, information, process, and technology changes necessary to execute their strategies. These practices utilize the various aspects of an enterprise to identify, motivate, and achieve these changes.’”

EA has a BOK: “The Enterprise Architecture Body of Knowledge (EABOK) is a guide to Enterprise Architecture produced by MITRE’s Center for Innovative Computing and Informatics, and is substantially funded by US government agencies. It provides a critical review of enterprise architecture issues in the context of the needs of an organization. Because it provides a “big picture” view of needs and methods, some enterprise architecture practitioners recommend it as starting point for a business establishing an enterprise architecture unit.”

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“EABOK (and the discipline it describes) is evolving (and partially incomplete). It places enterprise architecture in context. Because there are so many different frameworks and viewpoints about enterprise architecture, it provides a critique of alternatives (such as between the original Zachman Framework, TOGAF and DODAF). The bibliographies are particularly useful.”

Zachman: “The Zachman Framework is an enterprise ontology and is a fundamental structure for enterprise architecture which provides a formal and structured way of viewing and defining an enterprise. The ontology is a two dimensional classification schema that reflects the intersection between two historical classifications. The first are primitive interrogatives: What, How, When, Who, Where, and Why. The second is derived from the philosophical concept of reification, the transformation of an abstract idea into an instantiation. The Zachman Framework reification transformations are: identification, definition, representation, specification, configuration and instantiation.”

TOGAF: “The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is the most used framework for enterprise architecture as of 2020 that provides an approach for designing, planning, implementing, and governing an enterprise information technology architecture. TOGAF is a high-level approach to design. It is typically modeled at four levels: Business, Application, Data, and Technology. It relies heavily on modularization, standardization, and already existing, proven technologies and products.”

DODAF: “The Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) is an architecture framework for the United States Department of Defense (DoD) that provides visualization infrastructure for specific stakeholders concerns through viewpoints organized by various views. These views are artifacts for visualizing, understanding, and assimilating the broad scope and complexities of an architecture description through tabular, structural, behavioral, ontological, pictorial, temporal, graphical, probabilistic, or alternative conceptual means. The current release is DoDAF 2.02.”