Modern Enterprise Architecture – Things That You Must Do Right to Help Your Organization Benefit From Emerging Technologies

Enterprise architecture defines the overall structure and function of systems (business and IT) throughout the organization as a whole (including partners and other organizations that form the so-called “real-time enterprise”) and provides a common framework, standards and guidelines for layer architecture individual projects. The shared vision provided by the enterprise architecture allows for a consistent design of systems that are adequate in terms of meeting the needs of the organization and capable of interoperability and integration where necessary.

Techniques for modeling and analyzing business processes are currently one of the most important tools for increasing business efficiency. The use of such techniques and software has as its ultimate goal the reorganization of business processes and, as a result, an increase in revenue, a reduction in the cost of manufacturing products and services, an increase in product quality, optimal use of working capital, the introduction of automation systems and much more.

Typically, organizational leaders expect significant performance improvements, such as cost savings, to be implemented. However, the bottom line from implementing systems is difficult to measure. Large financial investments in management systems and the lack of a visible result lead both to the formation of a negative attitude and to discredit the philosophy of management based on the process approach.

Enterprise architecture is one of the elements of IT portfolio management and provides information about the business processes and technologies needed to automate them. The enterprise architecture services not only serves as the basis for the development of a portfolio of assets, but also provides the entire life cycle of many IT assets.

Due to the complexity of information systems and infrastructure in modern large organizations, any business manager faces problems when transforming business processes to meet changing requirements or conditions of the internal environment. To get out of the situation and conduct a constructive dialogue with the business, it is necessary to show both flexibility and consistency of approaches in improving the IT architecture, and this is very difficult.

At the first stage of building an architectural process, it is necessary to answer the following questions: 

• What are the goals of the organization? 
• What tasks does it set in the implementation of the methodology?
• What results does the organization plan to get? 

Answering these questions will enable a company to transform enterprise architecture into a tool that effectively achieves organizational goals and builds on business needs, not technology factors.

What can be evaluated when implementing enterprise architecture (before and after development): 

• Changes in business processes. Business processes are becoming more usable. 
• Increased variety in the number of products. 
• Reducing project completion time, increasing productivity (reducing rework associated with poor planning). 
• Reduced IT support costs due to a smaller variety of assets (the likelihood of duplication of information systems and their functions is reduced). 
• Integration with partners is simplified (planned in advance, implemented in advance, is flexible).
• The number of failures in information systems decreases and, accordingly, the availability of IS increases. 
• Access to information is simplified and the number of “one-off” reports is reduced. 
• Changes in downtime / availability metrics. 
• Reducing the number of urgent infrastructure projects (reactivity).