Enterprise architecture
The term enterprise architecture refers to
many things. Like architecture in general, it
can refer to a description, a process or a
profession.
To some, "enterprise architecture" refers
either to the structure of a business, or the
documents and diagrams that describe that
structure. To others, "enterprise architec-
ture" refers to the business methods that
seek to understand and document that struc-
ture. A third use of "enterprise architecture"
is a reference to a business team that uses
EA methods to produce architectural descrip-
tions of the structure of an enterprise.
A formal definition of the structure of an
enterprise comes from the MIT Center for In-
formation Systems Research:
Enterprise Architecture is the or-
ganizing
logic
for business pro-
cesses and IT infrastructure reflect-
ing the integration and standardiza-
tion requirements of the firm’s oper-
ating model.[1]
It is often said that the architecture of an en-
terprise exists, whether it is described expli-
citly or not. This makes sense if you regard
the architecture as existing in the system it-
self, rather than in a description of it. Cer-
tainly, the business practice of enterprise ar-
chitecture has emerged to make the system
structures explicit in abstract architecture
descriptions. Practitioners are called "enter-
prise architects."
Methods and
Frameworks
Enterprise architects use various business
methods and tools to understand and docu-
ment the structure of an enterprise. In doing
so, they produce documents and models, to-
gether called artifacts. These artifacts de-
scribe the logical organization of business
strategies, metrics, business capabilities,
business processes, information resources,
business systems, and networking infrastruc-
ture within the enterprise.
A complete collection of these artifacts,
sufficient to describe the enterprise in useful
ways, could be considered an ‘enterprise’
level architectural description, or an enter-
prise architecture, for short. This is the defin-
ition of enterprise