Sometimes the hype over an idea begins to distract from the basic intent and benefit of the idea. Enterprise architecture—the parts of an enterprise and how they fit together—is certainly a much talked about topic in the IT community, especially at government agencies. In case you are not tuned to this subject, enterprise architecture helps a business align its IT with its business needs. The idea is to take a holistic look at the enterprise, starting with the business goals and activities, then the information needs, and finally, arrive at IT solutions (applications and infrastructure) that work harmoniously to support the business. There are plenty of frameworks, methods, and software tools to help businesses create, document, and use enterprise architecture. Sounds good so far, right? Trouble is sometimes there seems to be confusion over what the “enterprise” really is. The typical approach is to think of an entire business organization as the “enterprise.” But what if a business is a huge conglomerate or, in the case of government, a huge agency like a country’s defense department? Would it make sense to define an enterprise architecture of such a behemoth? I think not.
In my opinion, it’s better to think of “enterprise” as a specific “business undertaking”—set of related business activities aimed at some common goal. If you think of enterprise this way, a typical business—large or small—would include a number of “enterprises” within its organization. Some of these enterprises would be common to most businesses such as human resource management, financial management, customer relationship management, etc. And there would be one or more other enterprises—undertakings—that would be unique to that business (the “core enterprises” of that business). With this view of a multi-enterprise business, the common “enterprises” could, in fact, be standardized and each could have a standard enterprise architecture. There are already commercial IT solutions for these types of enterprises (for example, ERP systems); perhaps what they lack are standard enterprise architectures. The business would then focus its energies on developing the enterprise architecture for each of its core enterprises. The IT systems supporting the business would be a combination of the commercial IT solutions (for common enterprises) and the business-specific IT (for the core enterprises). There is still the issue of integration of the architectures of these separate enterprises, but we already have the technical solutions such as service oriented architecture (SOA) to tackle that problem. The first step is coming to terms with this multi-enterprise—where enterprise means an undertaking—view of a business.
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