Enterprise Architecture
Would you start construction on your house with no architectural drawings, no blue prints, and no specifications for the foundation crew, framers, and electricians? Of course not! Unfortunately, billions of dollars per year are spent on doomed enterprise integration efforts that start out as technology initiatives using the buzzword of the week. Without involving all parts of the business in creating, maintaining, and implementing an enterprise architecture, you end up with one group (IT) building their best guess with no road map. The results are predicable!
At a minimum, your enterprise architecture needs the following elements:
- Enterprise Context - Defines all of the other partners, agencies, customers, suppliers, etc. that you interact with, in terms of who they are, your relationships, your transactions, and what they do.
- Enterprise Processes - Defines all of the key end-to-end processes, business functions, and data necessary for the success of your organization. This section of your architecture is the domain of Business Process Management (BPM), and is often implemented using a Business Process Management System (BPMS) that automates the workflow of your enterprise.
- Enterprise Services - The Pros From Dover, Inc.’s approach to BPM Enterprise Services defines all the top-level business functions, the data they use or manage, the operations they perform, and their interface to the BPM defined processes. This element is really what Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is all about. The tools from the various vendors are the implementation of SOA concepts, not SOA itself.
- Implementation Components - The Pros From Dover, Inc.’s approach to SOA Integration Implementation Components defines the SOA services implementation, the data implementation, common user or partner, customer interface implementations and any new or modified applications, or methods and procedures.
The Pros From Dover, Inc. recommends a model driven approach to Enterprise Integration starting with an enterprise architecture model using a common, integrated toolset. This model needs to include all of the enterprise architecture elements mentioned above, and should integrate with existing tools and data. To accelerate your enterprise architecture model development, The Pros From Dover, Inc. have created an Enterprise Architecture Model Template based upon the Gartner Group Framework using the Rational Software Architect (RSA) tool. With this template in a common tool, your business stakeholders, business analysts, and IT professionals can create the roadmap for enterprise integration in a timely, coordinated, and governed manner.
last updated 2010/02/06