Enterprise Architecture Enabling Strategies
EA enabling strategies and principles should be specific to each enterprise; And is governed by its business strategy by a large extent. In recent times, some common EA enabling strategies, in one way or the other, have influenced EA more than the others. This entry is an attempt to identify some of those more ubiquitous and important ones, that may further be elaborated on case to case basis.
Form an Architecture Governance Team
- A central team constituted with representation from stakeholders across the organization, should govern the planning, evolution and implementation of an Enterprise Architecture framework
- Architecture should be well thought through to meet the common goals of all stakeholders.
- The central team also should play a key role in establishing products, design and technology standards
Information Architecture should be done across systems
- Information is Business Asset. Decision-making requires information that exists beyond the boundaries of individual systems, departments or agencies. Hence information models should not be limited to system boundaries
- Treating data as a business asset increases the importance of identifying integrity and relevancy of data and improves data quality access
- Information should be classified. Appropriate security policy, DR policy should mapped
- Enterprise Security principles and standards must be identified and applied uniformly across all projects
Identify and implement common services for the enterprise
- Common services provide the basis of a truly service oriented architecture. Common Services will be responsibility of a inter-department ‘shared-services’ team
- Care should be taken to make the low-level common services independent of each other
- Common Services should respect the common information model as closely as possible
Factor in scalability
- Key aspects of scalability are volume, concurrency and functionality. Decisions on the underlying technology infrastructure should factor all these dimensions
Plan business continuity orientation early
- Assess availability requirements of the systems based on business needs. Overstated availability requirements can cost dearly. On the other hand, not considering business continuity with adequate seriousness can mean disaster for the business. Hence, appropriate reliability and disaster recovery strategies are essential to overall architecture planning
Reduce TCO
- Cost of compliance (development, implementation, maintenance, training, and infrastructure) should be balanced against technology considerations (scalability, flexibility, ease-of-use) in decision-making
- System consolidation and rationalization should be aggressively pursued aligning with the Business and IT Strategy
- Adherence to widely adopted open standards reduces obsolescence risks
Consider shared vs. owned and virtual vs. physical
- An increasing number of services today can be sourced from outside the organization, including hosted software, data, and maintenance of the same
- Outsource operation and processes, maintaining strategic architectural decisions
- Also, consider virtualized hardware platforms those can be scaled up or down on demand
