What is Enterprise Architecture ?
September 17, 2006
Is Enterprise Architecture the new buzz ? Everybody is talking about it as a way of providing response to most IT problems. But, what is Enterprise Architecture ?
An overview of IT processes show how they are coupled with customer process.
The first point of coupling occurs when a solution is acquired and go through acceptance tests. This is a loosely coupling since an event does not directly impact operation processes.
The second point happens when solution is in production, and needs to be delivered and supported. This coupling is then tight since an event like a failure may impact directly operation processes.
Enterprise architecture enables to monitor business alignement along these two lines of coupling from the point of view of :
- business requirements monitoring
- IT risks monitoring
- IT value catering
- IT costs incurred
With respect to this extent, Enterprise architecture defines two groups of process :
- Enterprise architecture planning which contains target architecture definition, as is assessment, migration plan definition
- Enterprise architecture governance which define politics for architecture changes, change management, reporting
EA models and software models
September 4, 2006
Before EA come out, software architecture already used modelling to manage software matching of user requirements.
Software models break down requirements in functions and associate them with components. Then, one requirement may be in relation with many components as many requirements may be associated with one component.
In the case of one requirement relying on more than one component, all them perform a collaborative work which means many messages to be exchanged, some of them internally, some of them outwardly.
A message is, at least, a query about a part of an object state or an event notification to an object for changing its state.
The same may happen between functional components, regarded from the business point of view, and technical components regarded from developers point of view.
Developer is keen to connect its technical work with user requirements and business to show how the previous support the last one.
When development finishes, it has to be componentized for preparing deployment. Deployment packages contain logical components which are deployed on physical computers.
Basically, EA reuses the same approach but one scale larger since it encompasses all projects. EA provides the framework to glueing software models.
