What is Enterprise architecture?
Enterprise Architecture is the link between strategy and implementation. It is a top down view of the structure of systems; it includes the fundamental organization of a system, embodied by its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles guiding its design. It can be defined as:
A means for describing business structures and processes that connect business structures.
www.sei.cmu.edu/architecture/glossary.html
There are four areas that are commonly accepted as the components of the overall frame work. These are:
• Business Process.
This includes strategy, governance, organisation, and key business processes.
• The Data.
This describes the structure of an organisation's data assets.
• Applications.
This provides an overview for the individual application systems to be deployed, their interactions, and their relationships to the business processes of the organization.
• Technology.
This describes the logical software and hardware that are required to support the deployment of business, data, and application services. This includes IT infrastructure, networks, communications, processing, etc.
It is can be used to get the current view of the business process and also where the business wants to go and how to get there. It can be viewed as city planning for IT covering the overall business processes and IT assets, how they're used, and how they should be built.
What Impact could it have on the business?
A strong Enterprise Architecture process helps to answer basic questions like: What are the organization's business processes, and how is IT supporting those processes?
In general, the essential reasons for developing an Enterprise...
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...requirements of an organization.
• The required IS and business capabilities to achieve these requirements.
It is important to include all relationships with external entities to help ensure proper integration with their systems.
• Required changes within the organization this.
This includes identifying the gaps between where you are and where you want to be.
Once agreement has been reached that this is right for the company and backing received for the key stakeholders the company then needs to:
• Agree priorities for delivery.
This needs to be planned in manageable stages to accommodate the company’s capacity to handle change. The company should also keep in mind the dependencies between one system and another or the possibility to run systems in parallel during the change over.
• Develop the required solutions.
• Agree standards.
• Evolve solutions.
The IT department needs to collaborate with the business to better understand how organization changes impact applications and systems. Moreover, IT needs to strengthen the IT-business alignment to stay abreast of future changes. One methodology that may assist here is business architecture, a blueprint of the business that supports aligning strategic objectives and tactical demands. 7. There are limits to customer-centric responsiveness.
... From such things as struggling with your weight to larger things such as buying a house or getting the promotion you desire, taking an encompassing goal and breaking it down to smaller specific goals allows you to create a defined map that will promote your progress, one small step at a time, until your dreams have been achieved. Works Cited Cohen, S. (2013, January). Student Health 101 @ Ashford University. Retrieved April 1, 2014, from http://readsh101.com/ashfordu.html?id=ec8bd17d.
needs to be sought out. Stakeholders, as they are normally called within corporate culture, are a
2.Who are the stakeholders and what are their points of view?
Hardware, software, support and maintenance costs grow each year with multiple systems in each local region running different types of software and hardware. The application and hardware support teams are larger than could be possible with one integrated solution.
At the moment, Enterprise resources planning (ERP) systems had become important systems in the modern business world. The meaning of ERP itself is an integrated software package composed by a set of standard functional modules (production, sales, human resources, finance, etc.) developed or integrated by the vendor that can be adapted to the specific needs of each customer (Esteves et al. 2000).
It enables an organisation to plan future activities by considering a number of questions such as: What are our Strengths? How can we build on them to ensure that we offer a better product than our competitors? What are our Weaknesses? How can we eliminate them? What are our Opportunities?
• Maintain software systems in line with the business evolution by preparing existing systems for fruition as a set of services within a service oriented infrastructure;
It improves business processes and decreases costs by allowing various departments to share information on a single system. Cooperation and interaction within departments are increased leading to greater communication and giving managers an integrated view of business processes (Seo, 2013). More companies are utilizing ERP with revenue growing from $17.2 billion in 1998 to $39.7 billion in 2011 (Seo, 2013). ERP systems are becoming the backbone of many organizations because of the need to be flexible and able to respond to economic change in a global
The ERP system allows a strategic flow of information between all areas within an enterprise in a consistently productive manner.
Stakeholders are those groups or individual in society that have a direct interest in the performance and activities of business. The main stakeholders are employees, shareholders, customers, suppliers, financiers and the local community. Stakeholders may not hold any formal authority over the organization, but theorists such as Professor Charles Handy believe that a firm’s best long-term interests are served by paying close attention to the needs of each of these stakeholders. The modern view is that a firm has responsibilities to all its stakeholders i.e. everyone with a legitimate interest in the company. These include shareholders, competitors, government, employees, directors, distributors, customers, sub-contractors, pressure groups and local community. Although a company’s directors owes a legal duty to the shareholders, they also have moral responsibilities to other stakeholder group’s objectives in their entirely. As a firm can’t meet all stakeholders’ objectives in their entirety, they have to compromise. A company should try to serve the needs of these groups or individuals, but whilst some needs are common, other needs conflict. By the development of this second runway, the public and stakeholders are affected in one or other way and it can be positive and negative.
Effectively integrating information technology (IT) into an organization’s business processes is critical if the organization wants to increase productivity and remain profitable. IT includes items such as the systems software, application software, computer hardware, and the networks and databases that help manage the organization’s information. When implementing quality standards and processes that are forever changing in the IT world, organizations must balance these changes while continuing to rapidly implement new systems technologies in order to stay competitive.
...mployed and timelines for goals; but when you are living the dream you can get lost in the details.
The significance of the role of the Operation System (OS) in the overall Information Technology employment sector cannot be undervalued. Indeed, it is hard to talk about technical skill-sets or the practical application of such skill-sets without at least some underlying understanding of their context within a computer operating system environment. From hardware specifications and requirements, user technical support, system administration and security, to software development and system implementation, operating systems are an integral part of the information technology and computing world in all its aspects, and it is difficult to form a concrete demarcation between specialized careers in this industry and the concept of the computer operating system.
There are many different ways to define an architecture as they can take many forms, including logical views, scenarios (or sequence diagrams), physical views and deployment views. Each view provides a specific type of information within the diagram and is directed to a certain audience, including Web architects, data architects, application architects and end users.