Enterprise Architecture

What is the Enterprise Architecture ?

The Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a major lever for defining these IS transformations and to steer them.
The diversity and complexity of transformations (including digital but not limited to it) conducted in parallel by public organizations enterprises reinforce the contribution of the EA.
Capitalizing on the experience of its members, the Urba -EA Club has set the playground of Enterprise Architecture through a frame of its activities.

The origins of the Enterprise Architecture and the IS Urbanisme 

The Enterprise Architecture (EA) found its origins in the late 80s in the US, where John Zachman provided a founding basis with the famous “framework” that bears his name.
At the same time, the Enterprise Architecture expands in France through IS Urbanism. Since the early 2000s, these initiatives were implemented in many companies and French administrations.

What does Enterprise Architecture brings ?

We can classify EA contributions according to five major themes.
Share a common IS vision, facilitate communication between the different actors
EA provides an overview of the existing IS for every actor and a prospective vision of the technological opportunities of the digital transformation for the business, and their impacts on the IS
The EA defines a common IS language facilitating the IS understanding

A new momentum: The digital transformation

For the company, the challenges of the digital transformation are numerous: optimization of operational performance, valorization of the information portfolio …, definition of new offers, definition of new activity areas, or even new business models to conquer new markets or to counter new competitors.
The IS is at the heart of all these issues. A new paradigm appears to IS: turning a productivity tool based on the sovereign IS into a business development tool open to the outside

Rôle de l’AE dans le nouvel écosystème du SI de l’entreprise

The EA has an essential role to play in this new IS context by strengthening the mastering of key elements for the success of IS projects linked to the digital transformation.
3 areas are critical to control components and the integration of the digital chain within the enterprise ecosystem:

• Use mastery including customer expectations and business needs,
• Control of information,
• Control of resources: technologies, solutions and particularly the services quality
• And transversely to these topics, the mastery of associated digital risks

Companies are experiencing major changes (new products, services, relationships with customers, regulations, mergers, internationalization, financial constraints …). Those changes affect both their business model, their strategy, their added value, their organizations, their modes of operation and also their relationship to the ecosystem (markets, customers, suppliers, …). And in this ” heckled ” context changes related to the digital opportunities are a key factor in the evolution of companies and their ecosystem.

In response, companies conduct multiple and rapid changes in their environment, their strategy, their business, relationships with customers …. Information Systems (IS) is at the heart of these changes.

The IS must answer to all these evolutions of business activities, but also create new opportunities for businesses. IS allows to take advantage of new technologies and new production methods (virtualization, outsourcing, cloud …), or to take into account new access modes (mobility ….) And new utilizations (social networks …)

The Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a major lever for defining these IS transformations and to steer them.
The diversity and complexity of transformations (including digital but not limited to it) conducted in parallel by public organizations enterprises reinforce the contribution of the EA.

The Enterprise Architecture activities

Capitalizing on the experience of its members, the Urba -EA Club has set the playground of Enterprise Architecture through a frame of its activities.

The frame of EA activities defined by the Urba-EA Club

• Is agnostic with respect to the methods or architecture frameworks that can be used by the enterprise architect’s teams,
• Is part of the various processes and IS management repositories (governance process, project management, development, production, budget management ….) it enriches for everything related to the architecture and component on which it relies on.

The frame of enterprise architecture activities defined by The Urba -EA Club identifies five main areas of activity for AE:

• Set IS Reference Architecture
• Strengthen the IS foundations
• Participate in projects
• Take over the governance of the application portfolio
• Maintain and disseminate the IS knowledge

These activities are completed by steering activities and EA support activities.

The main deliverables from these activities include:

Set IS Reference Architecture

• IT Master Plan / IS transformation plans (targets and trajectories)
• Prospective studies / technological business benchmarks
• Principles, rules and architectural standards for the construction of IS
• Catalogues of approved solutions

Strengthening the IS foundations

• Reference architectures, targets and trajectories of implementation of the given data foundations (repositories, exchange systems), application foundations and technical infrastructure foundations
• Participation in the governance of the IS foundation

Participate in projects

• Framework of the project by taking into account the IS evolution target
• Compliance reviews on projects compared to the IS reference architecture or architectural rules

Take over the application portfolio governance

• Analysis and monitoring of the application portfolio
• proposals for optimization and rationalization of the application portfolio

Maintain and disseminate the IS knowledge

• Mappings and representations of the IS
• IS Information Services

Le modèle de référence du Club Urba-EA

To ensure consistency between the different visions of the IS, the Enterprise Architecture must be based on a reference model.
The Urba-EA Club Reference Model distributes concepts and IS elements (descriptive elements and components) in four visions:

• The business vision creates a model for the business world.
• Functional vision describes the functional architecture of the IS. It is an abstract vision of the information system that can move in a structured way from the business vision to the application vision and build an urbanized IS.
• The application vision describes the architecture and software and datas components that perform automated business functions & objects defined in the functional architecture.
• The technical vision describes the architecture and the technical infrastructure that support softwares and data defined in the applicative vision

For each vision, concepts and IS elements are distributed over two levels, the treatment level or the “processes” in the broad sense, and the level of informations and datas.

The different plans of information and data constitute a transverse way to the four visions, which the club calls the “information and data vision.” The goal of this vision is to highlight the different concepts and representations relating to data architecture from the business vision to the technical vision, and their necessary consistency.

The Enterprise Architecture (EA) found its origins in the late 80s in the US, where John Zachman provided a founding basis with the famous “framework” that bears his name.

The Zachman framework allows us to identify and structure the different concepts, called “artifacts”, constituting the bricks used to realize modelling describing a company. He organizes artifacts as problematics:

• what, how, where, who, when, why,
• according to different views on the company from the strategic & business visions to more technical visions.

In Anglo -Saxon countries, many actors will develop in the 90s and 2000s approaches and EA practices. Thus in 1998 the Open Group creates TOGAF, The Open Group Architecture Framework, based on the work done by the Department of Defense of the US government. TOGAF is currently in a 9.1version.

At the same time, the Enterprise Architecture expands in France through IS city planning processes. Since the early 2000s, these initiatives were implemented in many companies and French administrations.

We can classify EA contributions according to five major themes.

Share a common IS vision, facilitate communication between the different actors

• EA provides an overview of the existing IS for every actor and a prospective vision of the technological opportunities of the digital transformation for the business, and their impacts on the IS
• The EA defines a common IS language facilitating the IS understanding, the collaboration between IS project owners, and the definition of the responsibilities on different IS components

Enlighten choices on the IS transformation at the service of businesses

• The EA significantly contributes to the emergence of IS structuring business issues and the definition of solutions to answer these problems.
• The EA facilitates the choice of IS evolutions by business and IT actors by the proposal of target path in a short and medium term and roadmaps, EA supports the architecture assessment risk assessment for structuring projects and qualification of project compliance with the company’s architectural policy

Improve the IS projects performance and the scalability of the IS

• The EA contributes to a better performance of projects in terms of alignment to big business orientations, risk reduction, completion time and costs reduction
• The EA improves the IS operation by making it easier to maintain
• The AE increases the scalability of IS by reducing its complexity and provides more agility through the promotion of modular and standardized solutions.

Optimize, streamline the application portfolio (IT assets)

• The EA optimizes the application portfolio by the rationalizations proposals, and by the obsolescence risk management.
• To reduce the complexity of the application portfolio, the EA promotes certified solutions (technologies, software packages) for projects or the migration of existing applications

Improve the application portfolio management of the enterprise and improve its consistency

• The EA brings information and datas knowledge (definition, location, source, certification, traceability …)
• It structures the information and datas knowledge and facilitates its governance (first shared data)
• It facilitates the improvement of the quality of information and datas used by the IS, the security improvement and the assets protection, the valuation of business datas

From the 2010s, the opening of the company to the digital economy is accelerating.

The digital environment in which the company is evolving, is structured in three areas: the sovereign space on which the company has control, the extended space in which the direct partners of the company take place (customers, suppliers …) and the digital ecosystem, an open space that the company can use to expand its economic space, or to which the company confronts to master the risks of its business, including competitive risks.

For the company, the challenges of the digital transformation are numerous: optimization of operational performance, valorization of the information portfolio …, definition of new offers, definition of new activity areas, or even new business models to conquer new markets or to counter new competitors.

The IS is at the heart of all these issues. A new paradigm appears to IS: turning a productivity tool based on the sovereign IS into a business development tool open to the outside.

The EA has an essential role to play in this new IS context by strengthening the mastering of key elements for the success of IS projects linked to the digital transformation.
3 areas are critical to control components and the integration of the digital chain within the enterprise ecosystem:

• Use mastery including customer expectations and business needs,
• Control of information,
• Control of resources: technologies, solutions and particularly the services quality,

And transversely to these topics, the mastery of associated digital risks.

On each of these areas, the EA plays a key role for the integrity of the “extended” digital value chain “extended” of the company

Use Control

Processes disappear behind the customs, customer behavior and satisfaction of expectations.
There are multiple answers to a need: Multi- management devices, mobility, mash-up, connected devices, social networks, … and the impacts on the IS are very diverse: Multi- channel, Apps, identity management, integrated multi- services, secure channels management …

With digital processing, to meet the new uses appears new solutions and new IS, more agile, the Shorter lead changes, more or less intertwined with the heart of IS, sometimes out of ISD direct control.
These new IS, often relying on new architectures must interface with existing IS as lasting elements of the new IS are intended to inter- operate with them. The EA plays a key role in facilitating interoperability.
The choice of architecture and solutions made in the projects related to digital transformation must consider the integration and coherence with the needs of the IS heart ecosystem.

In these areas, EA provides the framework for an overall management targets and trajectories of the transformation of IS.