The Practice of Enterprise Architecture (Part II)

Considerations are enterprise architecture artifacts that govern business rules through principles and policies. Senior business and IT stakeholders develop them to guide strategic planning and organization-wide decisions.

Explore principles as essential, abstract guidelines that guide global decision making and planning, using statements with rationale and implications to govern standardized processes and shared data across the operating model.

Identify policies as a strict, common subtype of enterprise architecture considerations. Learn how internal and external regulations shape security, compliance, and risk through reviews and standards.

Define conceptual data models as an uncommon, high-level view of core business data entities and relationships, aligning meaning across units and enabling consistent data exchange across the enterprise.

Explore analytical reports as an uncommon, executive-level analysis of technology trends and business impact, guiding adoption timing via hype cycles, technology radars, swot and vendor analyses.

Explore direction statements, an uncommon, high-level architectural strategy that defines future direction and rationale for major decisions, guiding alignment with analytics needs and technology choices.

Examine how meaningful, organization-specific considerations guide decision making in enterprise architecture, avoid trivial principles, test whether considerations can be disagreed with, and weigh trade-offs for sharing customers and disruptive technologies.

Explore standards as a general type of enterprise architecture artifact guiding technology choices, implementation approaches, and regulatory compliance, enabled by technology reference models, guidelines, patterns, and logical data models.

Technology reference models map technologies to functions across layers such as networks and databases. Color coded statuses—current, emerging, and deprecated—guide architects in selecting and decommissioning technologies for an optimized portfolio.

Explore patterns as common standards and proven reusable components for enterprise architecture. Use reference architectures and a catalog of patterns to avoid reinventing the wheel and guide standardized solutions.

Explore how IT principles function as a common, global, abstract, technology-neutral subtype of standards, guiding enterprise architecture decisions across domains such as applications, data integration, infrastructure, and security.

Explore logical data models as an uncommon, detailed standard for defining key data entities and their fields, keys, and platform-specific representations to enable interchange and interoperability across systems.

Explore balancing standardization and flexibility in enterprise architecture, avoiding overly strict standards that hinder projects; align with practical needs, encourage approved deviations, and enable learning and reuse of effective approaches.

Visions, a business-focused enterprise architecture artifact, provide high-level descriptions of future state and investments, developed collaboratively by business and it to align strategy with capabilities, roadmaps, and value chains.

Explore business capability models as strategic maps of an organization’s capabilities, using heat mapping to identify and prioritize investment in core capabilities for business and IT alignment.

Learn how roadmaps translate visions into structured, multi-year delivery plans that align business and IT, prioritize initiatives, and connect capabilities, goals, and budgeting across organizations.

Target states, a mature enterprise architecture concept, describe the future state and guide investments through roadmaps for horizons up to three to five years.

Explore value chains as an uncommon vision for information systems planning, revealing primary and supporting activities and how heat mapping guides strategic investments.

Explore context diagrams as an uncommon enterprise architecture artifact that depicts the current state of a company, showing major elements, information flows, and opportunities for future investments.

Discover less popular enterprise architecture artifacts related to visions, such as process models, core diagrams of the operating model, business model canvases, and organizational artifacts like structure and product catalogs.

Explore additional concerns with visions in enterprise architecture. Avoid overly detailed visions; keep them high level and one-page, focused on initiatives for the next year.

Explore landscapes as a focused type of enterprise architecture artifact, detailing current-state diagrams, inventories, portfolios, roadmaps, and their use in asset life cycles, reuse, and project planning.

Landscape diagrams map assets, interfaces, and data flows in boxes and arrows, offering an essential enterprise-architecture view of the current landscape and its limited future outlook.

Inventories, or asset registers, are comprehensive landscapes that catalogue an organization's assets with properties, owners, costs, and lifecycle statuses (reuse, invest, maintained, decommissioned), aiding planning and synchronization across projects.

Explain enterprise system portfolios as a landscape that maps applications to capabilities on a page. Show how they indicate current and planned systems, statuses, and support strategic decisions and roadmaps.

Leverage landscapes in enterprise architecture with business sponsorship, avoid ideal future states, and maintain a balanced, capable detail level focused on roadmaps and initiatives.

Describe outlines as business-focused, early stage artifacts in enterprise architecture, linking solution overviews, option assessments, and initiative proposals to decision making and investment.

Present solution overviews as finalized high-level outlines describing proposed solutions with goals, scope, benefits, and stakeholders. Include conceptual architectures, mini roadmaps, current and future state changes, and sign-off for implementation.

Option assessments present multiple high level implementation options for a business need, outlining advantages, disadvantages, costs, risks, do nothing option, and scoring to help leaders select the best solution.

Identify and evaluate initiative proposals as the earliest, high-level artifact that outlines the idea, its business value, a conceptual solution, and rough time and cost estimates to secure seed funding.

Explore less popular enterprise architecture artifacts related to outlines, including key decisions for outlines, architectural directions, one-page initiative overviews, temporary initiative roadmaps, and initiative-specific analytical papers.

Balance sufficiency and simplicity in outlines for enterprise architecture, avoiding excessive detail that hinders decision making, while communicating business value, potential problems, and estimated IT costs.

Designs are a general type of enterprise architecture artifact providing focused, low-level, end-to-end technical descriptions for specific projects, bridging architects and project teams, guiding implementation and validation.

Analyze solution designs as detailed, actionable specifications spanning business requirements to infrastructure, guiding project teams with the full stack of enterprise architecture from data to security.

Explore preliminary solution designs, an uncommon, high-level intermediate artifact between outlines and detailed designs, used to refine time and cost estimates and guide early implementation.

Explore less popular enterprise architecture artifacts related to designs, including key design decisions, architectural directions, supplementary materials, and release designs, and how they guide high-level decisions and implementation.

Explore the continuous CSV taxonomy for enterprise architecture, showing how artifacts position along two axes—what (generic to specific) and how (business to it)—to relate high-level and project-specific artifacts.

Map enterprise architecture artifacts to a two-dimensional continuous taxonomy along what and how axes (business to IT), and classify them as essential, common, or uncommon.

Trace the enterprise architecture enabled decision path from business strategy to initiative delivery through essential artifacts - principles, business capability models, heatmaps, roadmaps, solution overviews, and solution designs.

Understand the descriptive CSVLOD model and its essential, common, and uncommon artifacts—consideration, standards, visions, landscapes, outlines, and designs; recognize it is not prescriptive and six general types guide practice.

Explore exceptions to the csvlod model and how some artifacts fall outside its scope, including ad hoc artifacts and items that combine roadmaps and principles.

Discover enterprise architecture on a page, a single-page view that unites 24 artifact subtypes into six general types, color-coded by essential, common, and uncommon.