Enterprise Architecture (EA)
The summation of governance, models, patterns, principles, and standards that dictate the design and development of business and technical enablers for improved business outcomes. EA represents the alignment of business interactions (Business Architecture) and how they should best be supported with people, process, and technology.
Unfortunately, EA has been taken over by IT organizations to reflect the enterprise level technical architecture that companies need to consider for large systems or platforms. As a result, Business Architecture (see below) is currently evolving to be more reflective of the Enterprise Architecture definition above.
Business Architecture
Business Architecture is about learning how a business needs to change, designing the change, communicating it to others in their own language, getting everyone on board, and leading the transition.
Business Architecture identifies business goals, objectives, processes, roles, responsibilities, and information requirements necessary to perform the day-to-day business activities.
As Business Architecture evolves and corporate executives learn to appreciate the business architecture function, the work of the Business Architecture group will become broader and deeper in each business area to help align all aspect of the business together so the company can achieve all their strategic objectives.
Technical Architecture
Technical Architecture consists of two subcomponents that together provide the technical blueprint of how a combination of software and hardware will work together to enable people to perform a business function or role. These two subcomponents are:
The function architecture, which answers, “What are the functional requirements?” such as features, field, screen flows, interactions between other systems, etc. These should be in alignment with the business process needs. The process needs should come out of the business design work which is structured based on the business architecture,
Business architecture has to be in place before business design,
Business design has to be done prior to understanding the functional architecture,
Functional architecture leads to the identification of the functional requirements.
Non-functional requirements (19 overall), including, but not limited to security, quality, reliability, and availability (the need to keep a system running 24 hours a day, seven days a week), which support the technical enablement of the entire business architecture.