The Practice of Enterprise Architecture: A Modern Approach to Business and IT Alignment (Enterprise Architecture Research)

All EA artifacts used in successful EA practices can be separated into six general fundamental types: Considerations, Standards, Visions, Landscapes, Outlines and Designs.

Architects act as chief information systems planners and integrators of business and IT-related plans in organizations.

The EA uncertainty principle suggests that organizations can be either planned for broader scopes and longer horizons in less detail, or planned for narrower scopes and shorter horizons in more detail, but they cannot be planned for broad scopes and long horizons in great detail[240]. This universal principle is generally valid for all possible dis

Successful organizations are the results of well-managed evolutions, rather than the results of careful, deliberate and detailed planning.

The purpose of a city planning practice is to organize the urban landscape of a city, enable its sustainable development and make the city more livable. Similarly, the purpose of an EA practice is to organize the IT landscape of an organization, enable its sustainable development and make the organization more effective.

The structure of top-level business capabilities also correlates with the adopted operating models (see Figure 5.3). For instance, companies with the coordination model tend to organize their Business Capability Models according to the functional responsibilities fulfilled by their business units (e.g. enable, manage and run), companies with the re

the single biggest threat associated specifically with the practical use of Standards is arguably the development of overly strict and inflexible Standards, which can be harmful to an organization. Excessively rigid Standards virtually paralyze the delivery of new IT initiatives with endless negotiations, bureaucracy and red tape. The pursuit of st

Essentially, enterprise architecture can be viewed as a communication medium between diverse business and IT stakeholders in organizations enabling effective knowledge sharing, balanced decision-making and collaborative planning.

practicing enterprise architecture should not be confused with implementing popular EA frameworks, e.g. TOGAF, Zachman, FEAF and DoDAF. Though actively promoted and closely associated with the very notion of enterprise architecture, these frameworks are merely marketing-driven management fads unrelated to working EA practices and having no examples