EA concepts and introduction

During this week, I have checked the handout from the class, finished reading the case study, searched for the EA definition on Google and learnt some artifacts from the MIT Enterprise Architecture Guide.

Previously, EA seems too abstract to me. The scope of the enterprise is blurring and it is hard for me to differentiate it from other architectures like solution architecture or software architecture. Actually, what EA brings to the organizations and how can EA help them?

For the first thing, after checking its definition on Wikipedia, I got that the scope of the term Enterprise can include all kinds of organizations or units, no matter public or private, a part of the business or the entire corporation. The enterprise architecture, rather than simply a technological analysis of the existing systems, explains more managerial issues of the company in terms of people, strategy, business operation, data storage and system infrastructures. Sometimes, the enterprise itself is too large and we need to divide it into different functional lines to analysis it. This idea is also reflected in the EA3 cube framework.

For the second thing, the different architectures pay attention on different perspectives to meet different needs. The following picture shows it.

As I see it, essentially, enterprise architecture is piles of artifacts or say documents that illustrate the different parts of a company. Different frameworks are applied as the organization's needs to collect the information of goals & initiatives, business process, information flow, systems & services, technology infrastructures all together, to give a overall view of the different function units within the organization, including the connections between each other.

EA is a methodology that aims to help its document readers to have a better understanding of the current situation of the company so as to figure out what the gaps or problems need to be fixed, or when some parts of the business need to be changed, what will be impacted and adjust to make this change smooth and successful.

I have worked as a full-time intern in Shell for 6 months. During that period, Shell hired IBM to update its current SAP system to GSAP system. Although IBM has spent almost 3 years in Shell, they still don't know Shell's business process well enough. During the implementation period, our credit management team met a lot of problems caused by the bad connection between the order-making team and us. By studying EA, I think that it will save a lot of time and efforts if we have made some documentation like flow chart to clarify the information flow and the business process between different departments.