I advocate a view of Enterprise Architecture (EA) where the EA of a company is essentially composed of other EAs—a divide and conquer approach that’s standard practice in engineering and computer science (think of systems and subsystems or programs and modules). You start by thinking of an enterprise as an undertaking—some common business activities and then the EA of those common sets of activities.
Consider a company X that has, say, three divisions—A, B, and C—focusing on different core business (see the figure). All the divisions hire, train, manage employees, so that’s the “human resources” enterprise across the company. The divisions pay employees, keep track of money earned and spent, so those activities would be the “financial management” enterprise. The divisions manage relationships with its customers; that’s the “customer relationship” enterprise. These are then examples of the common enterprises across the company. On the other hand, each division has its own core “enterprise”—things it does uniquely. These would be each division’s unique core “enterprise”. The EA of the entire company consists of the EAs of the common and core enterprises and their integration. After such a decomposition, you can focus on developing the individual EAs and integrating them. That's the interesting part.
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