The Practice of Enterprise Architecture (Part I)

Learn how enterprise architecture serves as a collection of artifacts that bridge business and IT, outlining six domains—business, applications, data, integration, infrastructure, and security—to align stakeholders.

Integrate strategic management and project management by translating abstract business considerations into implementable designs, using artifacts to improve communication and align business and IT across the organization.

Explore enterprise architecture artifacts, providing multiple views and bridging business and IT through duality. Distinguish decisions artifacts from facts, and learn their permanent or temporary lifecycles, formats, and domain scopes.

Describe how architects act as chief planners and T-shaped connectors between business and IT, guiding collaborative development of decisions artifacts with stakeholders, while governance bodies oversee architecture functions.

Enterprise architecture provides a natural solution to align business and IT, improve investments, reduce complexity, and enable cross-industry applicability with disciplined planning.

Explore the historical origin of enterprise architecture and how modern best practices emerged from industry, while noting that frameworks like TOGAF did not define them and often produced unclear documents.

Debunks myths about enterprise architecture, clarifying what the practice is not. Shows that it is not purely technical, not one-size-fits-all, and centers on people, collaboration, and integration with business planning.

Explore how enterprise architecture mirrors city planning, aligning business and IT, balancing visible operations with invisible infrastructure, and leveraging existing structures for both immediate value and long term goals.

Explore six types of enterprise architecture artifacts: considerations, standards, visions, landscapes, outlines, and designs, and how they mirror city planning to align business value with IT infrastructure.

Explore six enterprise architecture artifacts—considerations, standards, visions, landscapes, outlines, and designs—and their csvlod model to align business and IT decisions across strategic, tactical, and project levels.

Explore why business strategy alone fails as a basis for IT planning in enterprise architecture, and explain the problems of vagueness, miscommunication, instability, and non-reusable systems.

Define five key discussion points for business IT alignment: operating model, business capabilities, specific business needs, business processes, and business requirements; enable a meaningful time-spanning middle ground for enterprise architecture.

Explore four operating models—diversification, coordination, replication, and unification—and how process standardization and data integration shape the landscape, strategy, and architecture principles between business and it.

Define and explore business capabilities as the organizational abilities that enable processes, people, knowledge, and information systems to execute strategy, bridging business and IT.

Explore how specific business needs drive business and IT discussions, outlining how to translate needs into initiatives, assess priority and landscape changes, and plan mid-term roadmaps.

Explore how business processes link human actors and information systems, detailing inputs, outputs, and steps, and show how automation improves insurance and order processes for faster results.

Define business requirements as detailed functional and non-functional specifications that describe how a system should work from business and it perspectives, guiding short-term planning and the alignment of underlying components.

Explore the hierarchy of discussion points in enterprise architecture and the enterprise architecture uncertainty principle, showing how operating model, business capabilities, needs, processes, and requirements translate strategy into implementable designs.

Explore the three enterprise architecture processes: strategic planning, initiative delivery, and technology optimization, and the artifacts they yield, such as considerations and visions, outlines and designs, standards and landscapes.

Enable collaboration between business leaders and architects to transform external environmental factors into strategic planning outputs for enterprise architecture, producing considerations and visions that guide long-term investments.

Translate a business or technical need into a working solution through initiation and implementation, delivering end-to-end information technology systems with well-defined outlines and business cases.

Translate the current landscape into an ideal, rationalized landscape by analyzing standards and landscapes, identifying problems, decommissioning redundancies, and outlining corrective actions.

Discover how strategic planning, initiative delivery, and technology optimization interact to shape and rationalize an aligned enterprise architecture landscape through visions, standards, and project execution.

Explore a high-level enterprise architecture process linking external environment to landscape through strategic planning, initiative delivery, and technology optimization, with essential stakeholder participation at initiation, design, and implementation.

Explore how IT initiatives shape the enterprise architecture portfolio, deliver solutions through initiative delivery, and inform technology optimization to meet business needs.

Explore five types of enterprise architecture initiatives—fundamental, strategic, local, urgent, and architectural—their origins, motivations, and how they flow through the delivery process.

Trace how fundamental, strategic, local, urgent, and architectural information technology initiatives flow through the initiative delivery process from strategic planning, external environment, and technology optimization to update the landscape.