What is the Benefit of Having Enterprise Architecture?
The benefit of having Enterprise Architecture is that it allows an organization to be highly responsive to change.
The Federation of Enterprise Architecture Professional Organizations paper, A Common Perspective on Enterprise Architecture, is a good resource for understanding this. I will summarize below:
Change is a constant. Today, change happens faster than ever. If your organization is complex, transforming it in response to external pressures is difficult. Enterprise Architecture gives you a clear picture of where you are and where you want to be. This makes it easier to understand how best to respond to change.
An EA practice delivers business value by producing several important results:
- An articulation of the strategic requirements of the enterprise
- Models of the future state, illustrating what the enterprise should look like across all viewpoints in support of the business strategy
- A road map of the change initiativess required to reach that future state
- The requirements, principles, standards and guidelines that steer the implementation of change initiatives
While these outputs are often the visible “things” created by Enterprise Architects, they are created in service of specific outcomes. Enterprise Architecture exists to help deliver an array of outcomes including:
- Improvements to the efficiency, effectiveness, and agility of the enterprise
- Innovations in the organization’s structure
- Improvements in the capability of change competency and continuous organizational innovation
- The rational federation or centralization of business processes
- Improvements to the quality and timeliness of business information
- Articulation and clarification of business rules
- Alignment of investment so that money spent on business initiatives and systems actually delivers on the strategic intent
Here’s a simple picture from the paper of what a good EA process should look like:
For more, I highly recommend you read the full paper.
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Bill Sourour is a professional Enterprise Architecture consultant; owner of Arcnovus Inc. and a most viewed writer in Enterprise Architecture on Quora.
