For years, enterprise architecture (EA) has been readily accepted as a way to establish best practices for organizing an entire enterprise, experts said. But as an agile mentality seeps into organizations, EA now has to come up with the best way of enabling technology to meet changing business needs, \u201cand it\u2019s the changing bit that is really key to new developments in enterprise architecture,\u201d said Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at consultancy firm ZapThink.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe old approach was much more static,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was, \u2018Assume we have a fixed business model and how can technology meet its needs?\u2019 to now saying, \u2018Business needs always change, and it involves changing how we think about architecture.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
Older frameworks, such as the Zachman Framework, only address “day one” and not the long term, he added. \u201cFundamentally, the Zachman Framework is ontology rather than a methodology. That is, it helps you organize concepts without telling you what to do with the concepts.\u201d It leaves a gap between the artifacts and actually helping the business achieve what it wants to do, Bloomberg wrote in \u201cThe Beginning of the End for Enterprise Architecture Frameworks.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that the addition of a methodology as a means for implementation of business goals could help, but he added that \u201ca methodology will still not get you where you want to go. You still have a gap between the technology meeting the needs of the business when you assume they are always changing.<\/p>\n
Colin Devonport, an enterprise architecture segment manager at IBM, said, \u201cThe premise is to make sure business goals become actionable plans that you can drive to obtain their benefits.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once an organization is clear on its goals, it has to look at individual options to see the impacts and decide what the best way is to go forward with the architecture, he explained. \u201cBut you can\u2019t stop there. You have to be able to bridge these plans into the rest of the IT organization.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really about getting to the business value, and therefore you have to apply a long-lived method to associate with that,\u201d Devonport added.<\/p>\n
One approach that fuses ontology and methodology is Pragmatic Enterprise Architecture Framework (PEAF). Founded by software architect Kevin Smith, PEAF started in fragments in 2002 and has become a complete framework, with version 2 introduced in March of this year.<\/p>\n
According to Smith, discourse in the enterprise architecture community about the best way to do EA comes from the confusion between what it is and what it really means. \u201cA lot of people, when they use the word ‘framework,’ they mean a set of pegs on which you can hang things. Essentially, that is a metamodel. It describes the information that you might gather and put in an enterprise architecture,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I use the word ‘framework,’ I use it in a looser way. For me, it\u2019s a collection of things, one of which is a metamodel, as well as processes, products, templates, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n
PEAF includes templates for preparation work, processes for the implementation stage (such as mitigating risk and setting up EA tools), to processes in the last phase (called \u201coperate\u201d), where EA is actually done, he said.<\/p>\n
However, no matter how EA is defined or approached, there is no one right way to do it, and \u201cthough EA fundamentalists will argue that frameworks are an essential part of EA, I see them more as a tool,\u201d said Jeff Scott, an analyst with Forrester Research.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cI haven\u2019t seen any data that suggests one or another framework has a significant impact on EA success. The real question is not how we build EA, but how we implement it.”<\/p>\n
But to Bloomberg, new implementations of EA need to factor in constantly changing business needs. \u201cAgility is a requirement just like other requirements,\u201d he said. \u201cNow it\u2019s, ‘Build me something that changes as my needs change.’ \u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"