Information Architecture is an established field, but is very narrowly focused on designing small-scale systems such as web sites and user interfaces. Within the past few years, there has been a movement to broaden IA concepts into what the MITRE Corporation’s Chief Information Architect calls “big IA”: Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA). This brings IA into the realm of company-wide solutions that align with business strategy.
Scott Bernard interviews Gary Doucet.
This paper represents a significant point of evolution in thought and practice about the design andmanagement of complex enterprises that often exist inhighly dynamic, sometimes chaoticoperating environments. The paper asserts that Coherency Management is the primary outcome goal of Enterprise Architecture (EA); that the architecture of enterprises should be formalized and promote coherency; and the best way to do this is to adopt EA as the ongoing, overarching method for abstracting, analyzing, designing, and re-engineering new and existing enterprises – regardless of the market, industry, or government sector that the enterprise belongs to. EA is about more than technology as it now has strategic and business dimensions – all of which must align to create agility and assurance in promoting transformation and delivering value. The paper discusses three modes of EA, namely Foundation Architecture, Extended Architecture and Embedded Architecture, that represent progression in thought and practice, with emphasis that the modes are independent but not necessarily mutually exclusive. The paper also discusses how collectively these influence enterprise coherency. The paper concludes by elaborating the ways and approaches to assess organizational coherence.
The U.S. Federal information technology (IT) space is currently experiencing the emergence and promotion of many seemingly disconnected and overlapping frameworks. This article provides an introduction to current prevalent and relevant IT frameworks and suggests possible relationships to the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) and EA function, with the intended audience being the current Federal sector EA practitioner.
Long term planning demands strategic vision, a clear picture of future operations. How does an enterprise create a strategic vision when Information Technology (IT) has become such a powerful force and everything seems to be changing? Part of the answer is to look for stability. This paper discusses the balance between stability and agility in open systems design. Logical structure is stable. The Delta Air Lines core diagram is presented as an example of strategic vision as enterprise architecture (EA). The CIO has an important governance role as sponsor and architect; the CEO as client.
Consistent with its goal of providing a management planning tool in the context of complex information technology, Enterprise Architecture (EA) unifies a broad range of documentation artifacts from different disciplines. Each of these artifacts is expressed in the language of its native discipline. By inclusion in an EA framework, the artifacts constitute the nouns of the EA language used to describe strategy and its transition to business capabilities. EA frameworks define paths through which decisions and facts flow in the course of pursuing an enterprise level initiative. The dimensions of an EA framework expose the boundaries that occur along these paths. When boundaries are crossed as detail is added and refined, transformations occur. Transformations are the verbs of the EA language. EA frameworks go to great lengths to describe their nouns and organize them into understandable dimensions as a form of dictionary to guide the practitioner. Yet the verbs that are equally important contributors to the quality of an enterprise initiative receive less attention. Like artifacts, transformations also have properties that can be tailored for efficiency. As a complement to EA artifacts, design and selection of EA transformations must also receive consideration when selecting an EA framework for a specific purpose. Fortunately for EA transformation analysis, a transformation is bracketed by the set of input and output artifacts involved. Thus it is instructive to use the extensive artifact descriptions from an EA framework to make value judgments regarding the choice of transformation techniques. Combined with known transformation techniques and transformation theory, an EA practitioner can tailor a framework for both artifact and transformation efficiency. Following an introduction that establishes transformation principles, this paper looks at a series of well-documented EA frameworks as means of illustrating the extent to which their dimensional structure and artifacts support efficient transformations. The analysis reveals the range of explicit support for efficient transformations within the EA documentation. Where transformations are not explicitly discussed as part of the methodology, characteristics of each framework that might form the basis for tailoring a transformation strategy within the framework are discussed. To conclude, a brief summary of transformation theory is presented in the form of a meta-model and a procedure for evaluating EA transformations.
