Enterprise Architecture

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The Frugal Enterprise Architect

In the last three years we have seen a significant focus placed on the practice of enterprise architecture, its importance to the strategic forward momentum of an organization, and the need to master the methodology, mechanics, and traceable metrics attached to the program. With books, magazine articles, and white papers highlighting the need to properly structure and invest appropriately in enterprise architecture, fledgling programs with modest budgets struggle to apply these broad but often considered „best practice‟ recommendations. Depending on corporate culture and tolerance for organizational change, senior management teams may be the toughest to convince of the value of a newer enterprise architecture program when, from their perspective, the wheels of the organization have turned smoothly for years. Lead architects with limited program budgets will need to be creative and extremely careful in their approach to developing an enterprise architecture program, but there are ways to achieve success as a frugal enterprise architect.

Auditing the Implementation of Enterprise Architecture at the Federal Railroad Administration

After several years of work, implementing enterprise architecture in the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA – a part of the US Dept. of Transportation), in Fall 2009, attention was turned to the question: How to efficiently yet comprehensively audit their implementation of enterprise architecture, to identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for future improvement? At that time, US agencies such as OMB and GAO had issued guides for reviewing (or evaluating, appraising, or auditing) government agency implementations of enterprise architecture, but these guides were not completely consistent with one another. A new, harmonizing version was being developed by GAO and was released in August 2010, containing the Enterprise Architecture Management Maturity Framework, Version 2.0 (EAMMF 2.0). This provides a management maturity framework which can permit an organization to achieve increasingly higher states of enterprise architecture management maturity. This article presents a pilot test project developed and conducted within the FRA, using the new EAMMF 2.0 elements and an audit methodology drawn loosely from the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI®) models and its companion Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement (SCAMPI) SM appraisal methods. The audit methodology proved to be an efficient way to assess FRA’s efforts in enterprise architecture. Findings also show that FRA’s implementation of enterprise architecture reflects very high enterprise architecture management maturity, suggesting that FRA has positioned itself well to support future initiatives such as the US development of high- speed rail and to continue to coordinate with its many constituencies including the railroad industry, other federal agencies, state and local government railroad agencies, and the public-at-large, to realize the benefits of enterprise architecture, all while dealing with rapid change, value, agility, standards, risk, and transformation.

Re-thinking Enterprise Architecture Using Systems and Complexity Approaches

This article looks at the issues currently confronting enterprise architects and the challenges posed when extending EA to be the architecture of the enterprise rather than just its information technology. It describes the contribution that Systems Practice and other disciplines can make to Enterprise Architecture (EA), and considers how the Cynefin sense-making framework can be used to help indicate which are the most appropriate types of approach.

Tactical Enterprise Architecture: Challenges to Building a Strategic Program

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is widely accepted as a strategic practice, focused on building a definition of future state and then managing a business and technology roadmap to help get there. The young EA program however, is often expected to contribute immediate benefits to the organization before an enterprise strategic vision or the long term roadmap has been defined. While engaged in building the solid foundations of an EA program, the Chief Architect will need to be sensitive to two distinctly different management expectations. The EA program must first be visionary, leading their management teams towards an integrated and enterprise view of business, information and technology architecture. Second, the program must also be flexible enough to manage tactical issues thrust upon them, and find ways to work those solutions into the longer term end-state architecture.

An Enterprise Abstraction Approach: Viewing Enterprise Architecture Through Natural Language Constructs

This article introduces an approach to define an Enterprise Architecture (EA) that aims to get closer to the abstraction level of the business side of an organization. Named as Enterprise Abstraction Aproach (EAA), the approach stems its roots from ontology engineering, business rules approach and business process engineering and aims to define business view of EA through natural language contructs. The approach also suggests to define domain ontology of the information view of an EA. By extending the business ontology definition towards information and technology views of EA, the approach aims to define a semantic mapping accross self-contained domain ontologies that pertain to different views of an enterprise, achieving a 360-degree view of the enterprise through a unified language.

Geographic Information Systems in Public Sector Enterprise Architectures: Issues and Challenges

Geographic information systems (GIS) are widespread at the federal, state and local levels. Data sharing is important because the ultimate power of a GIS is its ability to graphically present layers of data from multiple unrelated disciplines to create new information that allows people to answer questions. GIS have traditionally been built on standalone, stove-piped systems that present considerable difficulties to enterprise architects for several reasons. Although there are standard exchange formats for individual data types, there is a lack of federally-mandated standards for overall GIS data sets. This paper will discuss the efforts and associated challenges at federal, state and local levels to develop and implement GIS enterprise architecture frameworks, standards and enterprise architectures in order to better manage geospatial data. It presents the U.S. Census Bureau as an example of how the federal government is pursuing data sharing efforts with local government agencies, and provides examples of state and local government organizations that are implementing GIS into their enterprise architectures. It also discusses the impact of web technologies on the GIS industry and the differing opinions of the GIS industry on these technologies.