Enterprise architecture Maturity Levels
Ross, J. W, Weill, P and Robertson, D. C, 2006 described for
stages of enterprise architecture maturity of enterprises name business silos
architecture, standardized technology architecture, optimized core architecture
and business modularity architecture.
For business silos architecture, the benefits of the systems
are predictable and performance is easily measurable as the deployment is usually
for business units, functional areas or geographical areas. Applications developed
and implemented in this architecture make the enterprise competitive by
reducing time to market while at the same time these systems will not be
talking to each other and need quite an effort from IT professionals to integrate
them and tend not to share any common data and information in the enterprise.
This environment end up being expensive in making any changes.
For standardized technology architecture business units
notice that standardization of technologies reduces risk of doing business and costs
of shared services. The focus at this stage is to ensure that there
standardized hardware platforms, applications in order to benefit from reduced
costs as it is cheaper to run fewer systems.
In optimized core architecture companies migrate from
localized systems to an enterprise view of data and applications, building each
company’s unique strategic advantage on standardized core data and processes.
Business modularity architecture premised on reusable
modules and allows business units to ride on customizable functionality for competitiveness.
Business units’ managers are therefore able to bolt functionality to the optimized.
It is most critical that enterprises should not skip stage
in architecture maturity as they ultimately aim to operate with business
modularity architecture while building on internal architecture capabilities and
acknowledging that complex organizations have enterprise architecture at
multiple levels which target to focus architecture
efforts on strategic organizational processes (Ross et al,2006).
Communication With Stakeholders
According to Handler, R. A, 2008, it is important to identify and influence key
stakeholders and accept that doing so
requires stakeholder analysis and use pragmatic approach to identifying the
stakeholders who will lead to the best win-win scenarios with EA among others
critical factors such as consideration for the triple P (power, position and
potential impact) for higher level triage.
Business Goal and Strategy
It important that EA architects appreciate that their
efforts are meant to address the requirements of the strategy thus shaping the
current state, future state from the gap analysis analysis. The top down
approach to architecture recognizes the need to understand the vision, mission
and business objectives which should transient into the various into business
strategies given lines of business objectives, which is then represented by the
data information architecture, application architecture, infrastructure and network
technologies architecture and are interrelated through standards, security and
human resources that run such enterprises. All these are intended to achieve
the enterprise’s strategies and vision.
