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Almost every enterprise today lacks a formal architecture, similar in concept to the blueprint of a house or office building. No one will ever consider building a complex structure such as a skyscraper, automobile, ship or airplane without blueprints based on a complete set of integrated architectures. However, we consistently build, merge, reorganize, and run enterprises without a set of equivalent blueprints or architectures. When investigating problems in this environment it usually boils down to the fact that something was overlooked, a connection was forgotten or a relationship was missed! These blueprints and architectures form the nexus between all components, parts and pieces, and create a whole, complete entity. The typical deliverables from a corporate strategy usually include “something that you have to build, the what;” and “something you have to achieve, the result;” in order to provide a new or enhanced operational capability. This “something that you have to build” is more precisely defined in an architecture or a modification to existing architectures. We often represent the architecture in a formal model illustrating all of the components and their connections. As for the “something you have to achieve”, you have to implement the supporting corporate initiatives in order to produce the desired results predicted and expected in the strategy. To integrate and empirically derive all of the enterprise architectures, we need one base or foundational architecture, a central plexus between the strategy, its supporting architectures, and the predictable results of the planned initiatives. This architecture must be the superstructure that sits on top of all other enterprise architectures and is their hierarchical parent. Consequently any change at the top must necessarily propagate down through the other architectures, otherwise the integration is compromised. This hierarchical parent is the Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA). The formalities associated with building an enterprise business architecture and integrating it with enabling and supporting technologies do not require you to discard your current strategic planning methodologies. It does not require you to toss out all of your business process analysis and reengineering tools, techniques, methods and software development methodologies. It is, however, a disciplined and rigorous expansion in the area of architecture development used in most of these methodologies. It is another tool for understanding the enterprise, analyzing its opportunities, developing initiatives to sustain a competitive advantage, and bridging the gap to Information Technology (IT). The intent is to use the formal enterprise business architecture as a complement to other approaches and methodologies. We believe that this approach will provide keen insight into your strategic thinking. Adopting formal integrated enterprise architectures and building the EBA does not really require several new skills, but does require a realistic and practiced discipline and rigor. It is more about behavior than just learning a new skill. It requires inspirational leadership with an extensive amount of collaboration between various team members. It also requires a dedicated customer centric focus from the whole enterprise, not just a single organization or division!
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