Real Example of Enterprise Architecture Values

This time I'm sharing a list of EA values of mature EA practice. This customer is a leading company in the utilities industry with aggressive business strategy of merge and acquisition. as a result they have continues challenge of merging IT units together.

1. Creating one common language across IT units
   • Each term is currently used with several meanings, for example the terms system, technology, application and even hardware are being use to describe the same architecture definition across IT units
   • Creating System and technology architecture based on an EA approach will provide XXX one common language with clear definitions will minimize confusions in terms usage
2. Impact analysis through data and meta-model
   • Data exist in silos (Excel Sheets) without any connections between different definitions in different silos.  In additional to the fact that terminology is  inconsistent, data is stored in many excel sheets with no linkages.
   • Following an EA approach data are collected and related to other relevant data (as defined in EA meta-model) and enable better impact analysis scenarios based on the existing EA definitions, attributes and relationships. This approach will replace the today need to prepare data for each new impact analysis.
3. Architecture for agility
   • Using best practice definitions to conceptually split monolithic systems into set of components improve reusability and flexibility. Instead of treating IT assets as systems, EA suggest breaking systems into applications, technologies and (as indirect linkage) servers and hardware.
   •  This approach clearly creates boundaries between Business Applications (custom code to support internal business needs), Technology (purchased software to support the business application) and Server/Hardware. By building these "layers" using services, a change/replacement of a layer is much simpler. This type of IT conceptualization provides more agility especially when all relationships recorded can be queried by XXX IT teams.
4. Alignment to business
   • Using the suggested EA approach, Applications and Technology (with or without Services) are related to specific  business function that they support.
   • This enables the enterprise to see which business function(s) is supported/not supported by IT. Using this data, a long term IT planning can be created to improve IT to Business alignment as well as communications between IT and Business.
5. Services as a better way to increase reusability and flexibility
   • Services are any predefined endpoints that provide predefine functionality with known inputs and outputs. From the EA meta-model point of view services can be provide in different protocols (API, COM interface, Java/.Net interfaces, IPC, FTP, Web Services, etc').
   • The proposed EA meta-model suggests using services for technology and applications to simply enable us to expose functionalities that are consumable from applications and technologies that exist currently.