"The fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution."
The business operating model concept is useful to determine the nature and scope of the enterprise architecture within an organization. Large corporations and government agencies may comprise multiple enterpr ises, and may develop and maintain a number of independent enterprise architectures to address each one. However, there is often much in common about the information systems in each enterprise, and there is usually great potential for gain in the use of a common architecture framework.
TOGAF embraces but does not strictly adhere to ISO/IEC 42010: 2007 terminology. In TOGAF, "architecture" has two meanings depending upon the context:
- A formal description of a system, or a detailed plan of the system at component level to guide its implementation
- The structure of components, their inter-relationships, and the principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time
What Kind of Architecture Does TOGAF Deal With? There are four architecture domains that are commonly accepted as subsets of an overall enterprise architecture, all of which TOGAF is designed to support:
- The Business Architecture defines the business strategy, governance, organization, and key business processes.
- The Data Architecture describes the structure of an organization’s logical and physical data assets and data management resources.
- The Application Architecture provides a blueprint for the individual application systems to be deployed, their interactions, and their relationships to the core business processes of the organization.
- The Technology Architecture describes the logical software and hardware capabilities that are required to support the deployment of business, data, and application services. This includes IT infrastructure, middleware, networks, communications, processing, standards, etc.
Figure ag.02 Enterprise Architects Process Map
- Strategic Tasks: Often the Enterprise IT Architects are the people who help a CIO develop his IT Strategy. But besides this there are more strategic tasks-meaning tasks that have a planning horizon of more than 3‐5 years. IT Portfolio Management will deliver the basic data needed for Strategic Planning, which brings together the goals from strategy and the as‐is situation from portfolio management in order to develop a to‐be situation. This will be underpinned by a strategic roadmap that is a coarse program plan for a major part of the project portfolio.
- Operational Tasks: form the day to day work of Enterprise IT Architects. Strategies are nice-but you need to communicate them and you also have to make sure that they are applied and implemented. This is the field of Architecture Governance. First of all you will need to find critical projects- the ones that have the potential to change your architecture. This is done by Monitoring the Project Portfolio. Once you have identified the 10% or so interesting strategic projects, you will set up an architects team to accompany them. As they run through the enterprises normal IT Project Process.
- Basic Tasks: In order to get Enterprise IT Architecture up and running you will need to create a few foundations. In many cases it will be useful to run an EA tool in order to have a chance to track what you have in your application and infrastructure portfolios. In order to do this you will need to find or develop the right meta model for the purposes and in order to reduce complexity by standardization you will first have to develop standards that will be valid in the scope of your enterprise. There are more basic tasks-but these are the most prominent ones.