Enterprise architecture management

Enterprise Architecture Management (or EAM) is a "management practice that establishes, maintains and uses a coherent set of guidelines, architecture principles and governance regimes that provide direction and practical help in the design and development of an enterprise's architecture to achieve its vision and strategy."

Overview

The fundamental prerequisites for effective EAM are a current, consistent baseline of information about the as-is landscape and an integrated planning process from demand to budget to reach the to-be landscape. The enterprise architecture function also involves reviewing and consolidating detailed architecture decisions and migration plans to identify efficiencies, advance standardization, and align business and IT priorities.

As IT architectural layers, business support processes, and organizational structures become more sophisticated and prone to constant change, EAM will only result in haphazard business and IT alignment if the primary focus is on delivering sets of technically based models. This approach is only helpful insofar as it depicts the enterprise architecture as a snapshot in time, but it offers no reiterative process support to develop architecture solutions and test against different scenarios, benchmarks, and standards as dictated by the ever converging business and IT strategy.

Enterprise architecture

Enterprise architecture (EA) is "a well-defined practice for conducting enterprise analysis, design, planning, and implementation, using a holistic 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.".

Practitioners of enterprise architecture, enterprise architects, are responsible for performing the analysis of business structure and processes and are often called upon to draw conclusions from the information collected to address the goals of enterprise architecture: effectiveness, efficiency, agility, and durability.

Overview

In the enterprise architecture literature and community, there are various perspectives in regards to the meaning of the term enterprise architecture. As of 2015, no official definition exists; rather, various organizations (public and private) promote their understanding of the term. Consequently, the enterprise architecture literature offers many definitions for the term enterprise architecture; some of which are complementary, others nuances, and others yet are in opposition.