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Definitions of Enterprise Architecture Management

The terms enterprise architecture (EA)  and EA management (EAM) are widely used, but no commonly accepted definition exists.

Our definition of EA management and EA

Even though EA management is an emerging topic, which is addressed by nearly allglobally acting companies, no common established definition exists. Nevertheless, most definitions found in literature (see below) and the definitions gathered through interviews from EA practitioners (see Bu09h) emphasize the following aspects: alignment, holistic view, process character. The following working definition used by our group is taken from the Enterprise Architecture Management Method Library version 0.2:

Definition: Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is a continuous and self maintaining management function seeking to improve the alignment of business and IT in an (virtual) enterprise. Based on a holistic perspective on the enterprise furnished with information from other enterprise level management functions it provides input to, exerts control over, and defines guidelines for these enterprise-level management functions. The EA management function consists of the activities envision EA, document EA, analyze EA, plan EA, and enforce EA.

Envision EA is concerned with creating a target (ideal) EA based on the business and IT strategies that the enterprise seeks to implement. Document EA is concerned with creating a description of the current (as-is) EA. Plan EA derives intermediary architecture plans (to-be EAs) that are realized by corresponding projects. Analyze EA is responsible for making the architectures comparable in order to prepare a subsequent decision on the architecture to pursue. Enforce EA provides EA deliverables, which are used to steer, guide, and influence other enterprise level management processes.

Figure 1: EA management acts as glue between the other enterprise-level management functions

A major shortcoming of some definitions of EA management, is that some do not distinguish between the management subject - the enterprise - and the management function itself. We stick to the quotation of Rechtin, who stated "every system has an architecture [...] which largely determines what the system can and can not do". (Systems architecting of organizations: Why eagles can't swim., CRC Press, 1999)

Definition: Enterprise architecture (EA) is the "fundamental conception of a system [the enterprise] in its environment embodied in its elements, their relationships to each other and to its environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution. (IS0 Standard 42010)

Figure 2: A holistic perspective on an enterprise - Layers and crosscutting functions of an EA

The majority of appraoches to EA (management) agree on the scope of EA ranging from business to IT infrastructure, the number of layers varies. Similar, the research groups have a common understanding that the relationships between the elements on the differnt layers are more important than element details.

The crosscutting functions represent elements, which may influence elements on each of the different layers. Whereas an business strategy for example influences organizational units, business processes etc. on the business and organizational layer, the derived IT strategy influences the business applications on the application and information layer.

Defining enterprise (E), architecture (A), and management (M)

To approach the terms, one can start from the definitions of their parts as found in the encyclopedia britannica:

Enterprise

(redirected to business organization)

"An entity formed for the purpose of carrying on commercial enterprise. Such an organization is predicated on systems of lay and governing contract and exchange, property rights, and incorporatioin."

Architecture

"The art and technique of designing and building as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. [...] The characteristics that distinguish a work of architecture from other man-made structures are

  • the suitability of the work to use by human beings in general and the adaptability of it to particular human activities,
  • the stability and permance of the works construction, and
  • the communication of experience and ideas through its form."

Management

"The activity of management in organizations includes at least the following:

  • discovering, developing, defining, and evaluating the goals of the organization and the alternative policies that will lead toward the goals (planning)
  • getting the organization to adapt the policies
  • scrutinizing the effectiveness, that are adapted (control)
  • initiating steps to adapt the policies, when they are judged to be less effective than they ought to be"

 

As especially the definition of architecture mainly focuses on "doing architecture"  not on the artifact of architecture, an alternative definition given in the IEEE Std. 1471-2000 is considered here:

"[The architecture is] the fundamental organisation of a system embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution."

This definition is applied, as according to Rechtin (Systems architecting of organizations: Why eagles can't swim., CRC Press, 1999) "every system has an architecture [...] which largely determines what the system can and can not do".

 

Other definitions of EA and EA Management

Other definitions of EA (or the closely related term enterprise modelling) exist in literature, of which a not exhaustive list is provided below. These definitions do not strictly distinguish between the process of architecting and the architected artifact (see above):

  • EA is seen as a planning, governance and innovation function that enables an organisation to progress towards its vision of its future state.  EA describes the interrelationships between business processes, information, applications and underlying infrastructure for that enterprise and provides best-practices, [visions, principles, standards and processes] for technology purchase, design, and deployment. (Leganza 2003 & 2007)
  • An EA identifies the main components of the organisation, its information systems, the ways in which these components work together in order to achieve defined business objectives, and the way in which the information systems support the business processes of the organization. (Kaisler 2005)
  • EA is coherent whole of principles, methods and models that are used in the design and realization of an enterprise's organisational structure, business processes, information systems, and infrastructure. (Lankhorst, 2005)
  • EA is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the company's operational model. (Ross et al., 2006)
  • EA is the set of plans that describes how all parts of the IT infrastructure need to behave or currently behave to support the enterprise needs and goals - this includes all the data, the functions, the technology and the people that constitute the infrastructure. (Carbone, 2005)
  • The objective of EA is the organization of the enterprise as a whole, containing all its components, interfaces, business processes, organisations, employees, and their relationships to each other. (Lichtenegger, 2003)
  • EAs can be used as overall blueprints for applying IT to achieve business objectives and to provide a holistic view of the enterprise. (van den Hoven, 2003)
  • The EA combines an relates all architectures describing some aspect of the organisation, such as the business process architecture, the information architecture, and the application architecture. It is a blueprint of the organisation, which serves as a starting point for analysis, design and decision making. (Steen et al., 2004)
  • EA is the discipline whose purpose is to align more effectively the strategies of enterprises together with their processes and their resources (business and IT). [...] EA addresses business implementation in general and more specifically the integration in efficient business processes of the IT resources (e.g. applications, clusters, networks, ...) and of the business resources (e.g. facilities, people, machines, ...). (Wegemann, 2002)
  • EA is multi-disciplinary, employs different levels of abstraction and includes future state planning ... (I. Bailey - IDEAS Group, 2008)
  • EA is about understanding all the different elements that go to make up the enterprise and how those elements interrelate. (The Open Group, 2008)
  • EA is a strategic information asset base, which defines the [business] mission, the information necessary to perform the mission, the technology necessary to perform the mission, and the transitional process for implementing new technologies in response to the changing mission neeeds. [It further] includes a base line architecture, a target architecture, and a sequencing plan. (e-government act PL107-347, 2002)
  • An enterprise model is a computational representation of the structure, activities, processes, information, resources, people, behavior, goals and constraints of a business, government or other enterprise. It can be both descriptive and definitional - spanning what is and what should be. The role of an enterprise model is to achieve model-driven enterprise design, analysis and operation. (M. Fox and M. Gruninger, 1998)
  • [EA is concerned with aligning] enterprise [business] processes and structure with their supporting IT systems. (Wegmann et al., 2005)
  • EA links business and ICT. Relevant dimensions are business architecture, information architecture, applications architecture and technology architecture, each on any of the three levels of abstraction: enterprise, domain and system. (based on M. Pulkkinnen, 2006)
  • [An enterprise model must support two perspectives: a design and an operation perspective.] From a design perspective, a enteprise model should provide a language used to explicitly define an enterprise. [...] We also need to be able to determine the impact of changes on all parts of the enterprise. [...] From an operational perspective the enterprise model must be able to represent, what is planned, what might happen, and what has happened. (M. Fox and M Gruninger, 1997)
  • The essence of EA is to create a map of IT assets and business processes, and a set of governance processes that drive the alignment between business and IT. [...] The four architectural disciplines that are commonly accepted as subsets of overall EA are: business architecture, application architecture, information architecture and technology architecture. (J. Banerjee and S. Aziz, 2007)
  • EA is the holistic expression of an organisation's key bussiness, information, application, and technology strategies and their impact on business functions and processes. The approach looks at business processes, the structure of the organization, and what type of technology is used to conduct these business processes. (Meta Group Inc., 2008)
  • An EA relates organisational missions, goals and objectives to business tasks, activities and relations, and to the technology or IT infrastructure required to execute them. (J. Schekkerman, 2004)
  • EA defines together, how an enterprise is operated and how an enterprise is transformed. The enterprise model representation is described as a cube, along the dimension complexity, agility and synergy. (ECP, 2008)
  • EA is an approach to developing enterprise level capabilities of an organization by structuring the relationships and interarctions of its tangible and intangible resources and assets with each other and with the environment through a planned, principle-based manner. (Infosys, EA Survey)
  • EA is an approach for holistic management of information systems in an organization. (P. Johnson, 2007)
  • EA is a model-based approach to business-oriented IT management. (P. Johnson and M. Schönherr, XX)
  • EA is a structured and aligned collection of plans for the development of the IT landscape of an enterprise. The collection is oriented towards different stakeholders, different levels of abstraction, and different views; it therein depicts different aspects of IT systems and their relationship to the business alongside their development from past over current to future states. (K. Niemann, 2005)
  • An EA is the structure of an enterprise, consisting of the relationships among its ICT systems, the external properties of those ICT systems, and the way these create emergent properties with added value for the enterprise. (N. Zarvic and R.Wieringa, 2006)
  • [The EA is] that set of descriptive representations (i.e. models) that are relelevant for describing an Enterprise such that it can be produced to management's requirements (quality) and maintained over the period of its useful life (change). (J. Zachman, 1997)
  • EA is the fundamental organization of a government agency or a corporation, either as a whole, or together with partners, suppliers and/or customers, or in part (business units), as well as the principles governing its design and evolution. The EA focuses on the essentials of the enterprise, which, in contrast to specific solutions, are relatively stable over time. [...] The EA should provide an integrated and coherent view on the enterprise, aligning business, information and IT, and guiding specific projects. (R.M. Foorhuis and S. Brinkkemper, 2007)

  • Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a comprehensive model of an enterprise: a master plan, which acts as a planning, structuring, and integrating guideline and force for an organization. EA covers business structure and context, information technology dimension and organizational structure, and workflow dimension in achieving the organization’s goals and strategies. It seeks to promote synergy between the various dimensions, aligned with achieving overall business purposes. (Chung, McLeod, 2002)

  • [EA] is a consistent set of rules and models that guides the design and implementation of processes, organizational structures, information flows and technical infrastructure within an organization. (C. Magee, 2005)
  • EA - the description of the stakeholders mission including information, functionality, location, organization, and performance parameters. EA describes the plan for building a system or set of systems. (G. Osvalds, 2001)
  • EA is a representation of the organization to enable the planning of the organization changes. It includes the current and future business objectives, goals, visions, strategies, informational entities, business processes, people, organization structures, application systems, technological infrastructures, and so on. (C.M. Pereira and P. Sousa, 2005)
  • Enterprise Architecture. Defining the overall form and function of systems (business and IT) across an enterprise (including partners and organizations forming the extended enterprise), and providing a framework, standards and guidelines for project-level architectures. The vision provided by the Enterprise Architecture allows the development of consistent and appropriate systems across the enterprise with the ability to work together, collaborate, or integrate where and when required. (A. Macaulay, 2004)

  • [EA is] the process of describing, and the description of, the desired future state of an organization's business process, technology and information to best support the organization's business strategy. The definition of the steps required, and the standards and guidelines to get from the current state to the desired future state. (Gartner, 2006)

  • Enterprise architecture is a comprehensive framework or taxonomy of systems analysis models for aligning organizational strategy with information technology. (D.F. Rico, 2006)
  • Enterprise Architecture comprises the entire business with all its constituents. The alignment of the business and organizational design of the enterprise with the IT architecture is fundamental. However understanding and structuring of the basic elements differs. [...] Enterprise Architecture is a means to support business and IT alignment. Architecture planning is the ground for the development of the IT landscape and at the same time provides the agility to react fast to market requirements. (M. Rohloff, 2005)
  • Enterprise architecture (EA) describes the fundamental structure of an enterprise and supports transformation by offering a holistic perspective of as-is as well as to-be structures and processes. (Fischer, Aier, Winter, 2007)

  • Enterprise Architecture focuses on the infrastructure of an organisation, its processes, information, applications and technology. Derived from the strategy of the organisation, principles and guidelines are formulated that guide the organisation in the actual design of its infrastructure. Also, models are constructed that provide a high-level design and roadmap for the implementation of the architecture. Enterprise Architecture guards that organisations do the right things (planning) and that they do them right (quality improvement). (Greefhorst, 2006)

  • An EA [...] shows the primary components of an enterprise and depicts how these components interact with or relate to each other. An EA is a conceptual framework that describes how an enterprise is constructed by defining its primary components and the relationships among these components. (M.A. Rood, 1994)
  • Enterprise architecture consists on defining and understanding the different elements that shape the organization and how these elements are inter-related with the purpose of understand and facilitate organizational evolution and change. [The EA (model) is] organized into five architectural components: Organization, Business, Information, Application and Technological architectures. (P. Sousa et al., 2006)
  • An EA is a description of the goals of an organization, how these goals are realized by business processes, and how these business processes can be better served through technology. (R. Sessions, 2006)
  • Enterprise Architecture: A means for describing business structures and processes that connect business structures. (Architecture glossary of CMU)
  • An EA is a "blueprint" or "picture" which assists the design of an enterprise. It must therein define three things [what activities an enterprise performs, how the enterprise performs the activities, how the enterprise should be constructed]. (D.H. Liles and A.R. Presley, 1996)
  • An EA is a "blueprint" that documents all th information systems within the enterprise, their relationships, and how they interact to fulfill the enterprise's mission. [It is used to] analyze [an organization's] business operations, allowing [...] to identify and address shortcomings or inconsistencies and to eliminate costly errors, redundancies, and inefficiencies. (D. West and K. Bittner and E. Glenn, IBM Rational Edge, 2002)
  • Enterprise architecture (EA) is a simplified and ag-gregated representation of the basic structure and or-ganisation of the enterprise. It is a plan which shows the main features and characteristics of the enter-prise and its assets that are to be analysed, justified and agreed before the detailed technical design. It is shared and discussed enterprise-wide at a high level of abstraction between all stakeholders. (F. Lillehagen and D. Karlsen, 2006)
  • Enterprise Architecture (EA) is the complete, consistent and coherent set of methods, rules, models and tools which will guide the (re)design, analysis, implementation and governance of business processes, organizational structures, information systems and the technical infrastructure of an organization according to a vision. (Iacob et al., 2007)
  • The idea of enterprise architecture is that it can be used to guide design decisions and limits the solution space by setting constraints. Architectural principles are textual statements that describe the constraints imposed upon the organization, and/or the decisions taken in support of realizing the business strategies. Principles restrict architectures and set the direction for the future. Architectural descriptions can form the basis for the implementation and transformation of existing structure into the desired architecture. (M. Janssen and G. Kuk, 2006)

Literature on EA not listed above:

  • W. Keller - provides no own definition for EA and only a pragmatic one for the IT-subset of EA, the IT-EA.
  • G. Dern - provides no EA definition.
  • Armour, Kaisler, and Liu - define EA via derivations of the definitions of the terms "architecture", "software architecture", "information architecture", etc.
  • M. El Kourdi and H. Shah and A. Atkins  - provide no own definition but stay to the definition by Ross.
  • J. Schelp and M. Stutz - provide no own definition but stay to the definitions as given be Winter.
  • R. Magalhaes and M. Zacarias and J. Tribole - provide no own definition of EA but refer to "enterprise modeling".
  • J. McGovern et al. - provide no definition of EA, but say that EA encompasses architectures on the levels business, information, operational, organizational, architectural, and infrastructure.
  • R. Evernden and E. Evernden - do not refer to the term "EA", therefore no definition is given in the articles
  • Feurer - uses the EA definition of Gartner
  • G. Tarcisius and R. Al-Ekram and Y. Ping - provide no own defintion but use the definition given by Rood
  • Gerber, Meyer and Richtert - provide no own definition
  • Gils and Vojevodina - provide no own definition but use the definition given by Lankhorst
  • Hamilton, Catania - provide no own definitiion but use the definition of Sims
  • D. van Leuwen and H. ter Doest and M. Lankhorst - provide no definition 2004 but stay to the definition of Bernus
  • Harmon - provide no definition but use the definition of Zachman