This book presents a comprehensive overview of enterprise architecture management with a specific focus on the business aspects. While recent approaches to enterprise architecture management have dealt mainly with aspects of information technology, this book covers all areas of business architecture from business motivation and models to business execution. The book provides examples of how architectural thinking can be applied in these areas, thus combining different perspectives into a consistent whole. In-depth experiences from end-user organizations help readers to understand the abstract concepts of business architecture management and to form blueprints for their own professional approach. Business architecture professionals, researchers, and others working in the field of strategic business management will benefit from this comprehensive volume and its hands-on examples of successful business architecture management practices.
The Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) discipline deals with the alignment of business and information systems architectures. While EAM has long been regarded as a discipline for IT managers, this book takes a different stance: It explains how top executives can use EAM to leverage their strategic planning and controlling processes, as well as how it can contribute to their sustainable competitive advantage. Based on the analysis of best practices from eight leading European companies from various industries, the book presents the crucial elements of successful EAM. It outlines what executives need to do in terms of governance, processes, methodologies, and culture in order to bring their management to the next level. Beyond this, the book points out how EAM could develop in the next decade, thus allowing today’s managers to prepare for the future architecture management.
Organizations today exist in an environment of unprecedented change. They do so against a backdrop of a global, competitive marketplace, the fast-paced enablement of technology, amplified regulation and accelerating organizational complexity. Many organizations are addressing change in a sub-optimal way and they are operating without a clear view of where their operational risks lie. It is these dynamics that are leading organizations to recognise and embrace Business Architecture. Despite this environment, Business Architecture can be a difficult ’sell’ - it is often perceived to be abstract and lacking in tangible delivery. To succeed, Business Architecture must be pragmatic and, to be sustainable, it must focus on achieving long-term value and, at the same time, recognise the shorter-term tactical needs of the organisation. With these challenges in mind, this book provides a practical guide on how to employ Business Architecture and how to build a balanced proposition that delivers value to a broad range of stakeholders. As the book states, Business Architecture should not be practised in isolation, nor should it be thought of as a one-off process; it needs to be woven into the fabric of the organization. And so the authors illustrate the opportunities for weaving the Business Architecture Practice into this fabric through the various stakeholders and life cycles that exist, both formally and informally, within an organization. Whilst recognizing best practice, this book explores a new, inspirational level of Business Architecture whilst acknowledging that the best way to realize the vision is one step at a time.
Enterprise architecture defines a firm's needs for standardized tasks, job roles, systems, infrastructure, and data in core business processes. This book explains enterprise architecture's vital role in enabling - or constraining - the execution of business strategy. It provides frameworks, case examples, and more.
This textbook provides a hands-on introduction to enterprise architecture management. It guides the reader through the applications of methods and tools to typical business problems by presenting enterprise architecture frameworks and by sharing experiences from industry. The structure of the book represents the typical stages of the journey of an enterprise architect. Chapter 1 addresses the central question of what to achieve with the introduction of an enterprise architecture. Chapter 2 then introduces concepts and visualizations for business architecture that help with understanding the business. In chapter 3 the development of an application architecture is outlined, which provides transparency on information systems and their business context. Next, chapter 4 presents visual tools to analyze, improve and eventually optimize the application landscape. Chapter 5 discusses both traditional organizational as well as collaborative approaches to enterprise architecture management. Eventually, several established enterprise architecture frameworks like TOGAF, Zachmann, ArchiMate, and IAF are described in chapter 6. The book concludes with a summary and an outlook on future research potential in chapter 7. Based on their experiences through several years of teaching, the authors introduce students step-by-step to enterprise architecture development and management. Their book is intended as a guide for master classes at universities and includes lots of exercises and references for further reading.
Build a Business Architecture Framework to enable your organization to grow and gracefully accommodate change. The practical approach described in this book can help you as a business architect analyst or manager create reusable adaptable and manageable knowledge of your organization. Apply the full lifecycle from business strategy through implementation and identify the required knowledge domains. Convert business strategy into usable and effective business designs which optimize investment decisions. Articulate what domain knowledge (the dots) needs to be collected how these are connected and which combinations provide the greatest opportunity if corrected. The book covers the main business architecture stages of 'Define the Business' 'Design the Business' 'Build the Business' and 'Operate the Business'. Build models of the external ecosystem business stakeholders business information business processes business capabilities change prioritization and performance management systems to support your change journey. This book is an essential companion guide for new business architects and analysts and a valuable reference for experienced architects to enhance their practice.
History has shown that having a competitive advantage is critical to the success and long-term viability of all organizations. However, creating and sustaining such an advantage is a challenge. Organizations must formulate a winning strategy, surpass competitors at implementing and executing it, and excel at adapting in response to internal and external events. Although organizations have applied numerous best practices to help them succeed in their strategic endeavors, they still face serious difficulties, which they can only surmount by adopting business architecture. The goal of this book is to describe what business architecture is; how it can help meet the challenge of formulating, implementing and executing an organization’s strategy; and how to build and exploit a superior strategy management system that leverages business architecture.
This IBM® Redbooks® publication explains how to combine business process management (BPM) and Enterprise Architecture (EA) for better business outcomes. This book provides a unique synergistic approach to BPM and EA, based on a firm understanding of the life cycles of the enterprise and the establishment of appropriate collaboration and governance processes. When carried out together, BPM provides the business context, understanding, and metrics, and EA provides the discipline to translate business vision and strategy into architectural change. Both are needed for sustainable continuous improvement. This book provides thought leadership and direction on the topic of BPM and EA synergies. Although technical in nature, it is not a typical IBM Redbooks publication. The book provides guidance and direction on how to collaborate effectively across tribal boundaries rather than technical details about IBM software products. The primary audience for this book is leaders and architects who need to understand how to effectively combine BPM and EA to drive, as a key differentiator, continuous improvement and transformational change with enterprise scope.
The popularity of enterprise architecture (EA) has increased in the last two decades, in both business and academic domains. Despite the cumulative interest from all sectors, the implementation and practice of EA have been entangled with numerous challenges and complexities. Consequently, some organisations continue to theorise the concept, which has ramifications on practice and return on investment (ROI). This has led to many studies that have been conducted, to understand the complexities impacting the implementation and practice of EA in organisations. Yet, the trajectory of some convolutions remains mystery in many quarters. This attributes to the struggle to articulate the value of EA in many environments. Hence many organisations find it difficult to apply EA for strategic management of modern information technology (IT) solutions. Enterprise Architecture for Strategic Management of Modern IT Solutions provides guidance on how to employ EA in deploying and managing IT solutions from pragmatic and implementable strategies’ perspectives. Until now, implementation and practice of EA have been slow, despite its growing popularity and interest from all sectors. The author employs sociotechnical theories such as actor-network theory (ANT) and structuration theory (ST) as lenses to examine and explain why and how challenges and complexities exist and derail the implementation or practice of EA in organisations. By doing so, this serves to enable practitioners and readers to gain fresh insights on why the challenges exist and how they can be addressed in creating collaborative capabilities for business enhancement, sustainability, and competitiveness. The book provides detailed insights on how to apply EA for organisational purposes, from three main fronts. First, it explains the implications that lack of understanding of EA have on organisational activities and processes. Second, it examines the challenges and complexities that hinder the implementation and practice of EA in organisations. Third, it proposes models and frameworks on how EA can be applied for strategic management of modern IT solutions in organisations. Written for postgraduates, researchers, academics, and professionals in the fields of EA, IT, and information systems, this book provides a valuable resource that will enable and enhance implementation and practice of EA including future studies.
An enterprise architecture tries to describe and control an organisation’s structure, processes, applications, systems and techniques in an integrated way. The unambiguous specification and description of components and their relationships in such an architecture requires a coherent architecture modelling language. Lankhorst and his co‐authors present such an enterprise modelling language that captures the complexity of architectural domains and their relations and allows the construction of integrated enterprise architecture models. They provide architects with concrete instruments that improve their architectural practice. As this is not enough, they additionally present techniques and heuristics for communicating with all relevant stakeholders about these architectures. Since an architecture model is useful not only for providing insight into the current or future situation but can also be used to evaluate the transition from ‘as‐is’ to ‘to‐be’, the authors also describe analysis methods for assessing both the qualitative impact of changes to an architecture and the quantitative aspects of architectures, such as performance and cost issues. The modelling language presented has been proven in practice in many real‐life case studies and has been adopted by The Open Group as an international standard. So this book is an ideal companion for enterprise IT or business architects in industry as well as for computer or management science students studying the field of enterprise architecture.
