How to Explain Enterprise Architecture to Business

Bloemfontein, a city in South Africa, experienced water shortages a few years ago. In order to save water, the city council proposed that residents place bricks in their toilet bowls to decrease the amount of water consumed during flushes. This reduced the water consumption significantly, but impacted the overall architecture negatively. There is a standard for the amount of water that must flow through a sewerage system to keep things moving. The water flow through the sewerage system was reduced below the critical limit, and everything blocked up. Had they studied the blueprints for the sewerage system, the standards, both international and South African based, and understood the processes involved with the sewerage system, this could have been avoided.

An enterprise’s architecture is the blueprint of the business. It consists of the business processes that are executed by the employees, the information used within these processes, the applications providing the information, and the infrastructure it runs on. Enterprise Architects document the blueprint in a model known as the Enterprise Architecture Meta Model, within the context of the operating model of the business.

A good analogy for enterprise architecture is city planning. A city planner determines where the industrial, residential and business areas are within the city. They also design the water, electricity and sewerage system required for this city to function, as well as the standards for these. The city planner also determine how these utilities should be implemented as the town expands.

These are comparable to the architecture domains, standards and roadmaps. Each domain contains principles, i.e. “Residents’ safety and health will be protected in residential areas”. This principle is the reason why highways do not have off-ramps directly to your home, or why schools are built close to residential areas.

Each domain also contains the international standards that are applicable to the domain, i.e. “Roofs consisting of ceramic roof tiles must have an incline larger than 30 degrees”. The international standards provide best practices that have been determined by internationally recognized organizations. These not only protect the consumer from sub-quality items, but also enable the co-existence of multi-vendor products within the same city.

Another important component is the product standards, i.e. “Residential water supply piping must be of type P25M”. This piping protects each resident’s water supply and pressure by limiting the amount of water that each resident can draw from the system. If one resident can install a pipe larger than 25mm, he will be able to use most of the water provided for the neighborhood and adversely affect the flow of water to other residents. Each of these product standards ensure that the overall architecture is maintained.

Lastly, the roadmaps determine how the standards and products in each domain must expand and change to cater for the changes within the business, i.e. -how many, and when, shopping centers should be build to service the growth within the residential areas. Without the roadmaps, the architecture may grow out of shape, and leave only one small shopping mall for the entire city.

In general Enterprise Architecture delivers the following value to the business:

• Providing direction to IT organization via the development of the IT Strategy.
• Providing best practices and standards by documentation of the architecture, including principles, international standards, product standards and roadmaps.
• Improving the speed and quality of project delivery through standardizing the architecture development within the bigger business project delivery methodology.
• Establishing and maintaining governance through the Enterprise Architecture governance and standards.
• Providing a platform for reuse, standardization and optimization of processes, information, applications and infrastructure through the Enterprise Architecture Meta Model.
• Providing specialist knowledge and experience through consultation to all projects within IT and the business.