What is Enterprise Architecture
As information technology continues to evolve at breakneck speed, larger organizations require a structured framework to assimilate the latest technological innovations and assess how they relate to business strategy.
Whether it’s machine learning, automated analytics, or cloud computing, businesses need a plan to help them decide what technologies to invest in and how to use them. This is where Enterprise Architecture (EA) comes in.
What is Enterprise Architecture?
Enterprise Architecture is a cross-functional discipline for designing and implementing a company’s complex enterprise-wide technology infrastructure. The goal is to design an IT framework that aligns with business strategy, can be easily maintained and scaled, and uses technology efficiently. EA is a key component of a company’s IT strategy.
Enterprise Architecture entails the development of the following four “architectures:”
- Business Architecture: defines business strategy and organization, key business processes, and governance and standards.
- Application Systems Architecture: provides an outline for deploying individual systems. This includes the connections between application systems and their relationships to vital business processes.
- Data Architecture: relates to the structure of logical and physical data assets as well as any related data management resources.
- Technology Architecture: documents the hardware, software, and network infrastructure required to support the deployment of mission-critical applications.
Why is Enterprise Architecture Important for a Company to Have?
Enterprise Architecture helps to describe movable pathways to achieve specific business goals against a time horizon while staying flexible in adopting beneficial new tools and technologies. As technology evolves, EA enables organizations to maintain a balance between IT assets and business processes. It provides a unified view of how information systems work across the enterprise.
Key Benefits of Enterprise Architecture
There are many benefits to Enterprise Architecture. It can help with:
- Ensuring that a company’s IT strategy aligns with its business goals
- Eliminating knowledge and documentation gaps in the company’s current IT capabilities by developing formal business process models
- Improving communication between stakeholders across different departments within the organization
- Improving productivity by eliminating redundancies in workflows and processes
- Reducing costs by increasing interoperability between systems
Enterprise Architecture at Nolij
At Nolij, our EA team works on some of the nation’s most complex systems at the Department of Defence. The Nolij EA team has been integral in defining key workflows for Covid-19 vaccination distribution within the Defence Health Agency. Here are some of our key EA services.
- Nolij provides EA lifecycle support, including artifact development, alignment, planning, integration, federation, review, and publication.
- Nolij develops and documents requirements, and defines program charters, guides, methodologies, and modelling guidebooks.
- We lay the groundwork for EA analysis and planning, and develop documentation for systems architecture, data architecture, and solutions architecture.
The eventual goal of any Enterprise Architecture strategy is to enhance the timeliness and reliability of business information. Employed effectively, EA can be highly beneficial in standardizing and consolidating organizational processes for increased consistency and efficacy.