Enterprise Architecture

We believe that the purpose of developing an enterprise architecture is to organize, manage and share knowledge with a goal to helping the organization have the wisdom to do the right thing at the right time.

In order to achieve this goal it is crucial to:

• understand what knowledge it is important to store and to share
• understand how that knowledge can be developed
• understand when and why the knowledge might be changed or improved
• provide a structured repository where the knowledge can be stored

DEA works with our clients to help them develop answers to these important questions.

The What…

How do you know what information should be included in your enterprise architecture? You must examine the goals of sharing information among communities within the organization. For example, the underwriting group in an insurance organization may want to share the lines of business the company participates in, the rules governing policies, and any guidelines for making good underwriting decisions. In that same organization, the most important information for business analysts may be the current systems that are in place and the business processes they support. For the CIO, a description of all current systems, the technical architecture, system interfaces, and of data heritage will be key. In each of these cases, the organization must identify who will share the information and identify what information is important to them.

The How...

Knowledge already exists in any organization — system descriptions, business process procedures, templates that someone has used in previous assignments, data that exists, client deliverables, project plans and so on.

Other knowledge exists, but may not yet be visible to others. Building an enterprise architecture is basically a process of finding important information, capturing it, and structuring it. Then the information can be shared in a library, so to speak, and everyone who needs it can find it.

The When and Why...

Once you’ve identified, gathered and structured the information in your enterprise architecture, you’re not done. You must also decide who can change the information, when it can be changed, and what might cause it to be changed, and put in place a management process for certifying ‘good’ information, promoting assets to the library, and notifying users of the latest updates.

The Where…

With management processes in place, you need a library for your assets. At DEA, we have developed EnterpriseLINK™ for this purpose. EnterpriseLINK is a Web-based tool that allows an organization to view, share, and collaborate on its valuable artifacts. It can be configured to publish and support any kind of information, whether the goal is to develop a full enterprise architecture, to communicate business area information to managers and operational staff, to build a meta data repository, or to house IT’s system inventory.