The Concept of Architecture for the Enterprise Architect

The Concept of Architecture

This section is envisioned to show to the reader the horizontal and vertical related architectures to the EA. In locating the EA, the state of EA will pinpoint the Enterprise Architect position. Moreover, the historical evolution of the retrospective view on architecture is presented.

Architectures – a timeline comparison

This sub-section is intentional to compare the traditional architecture of built environment with the organizational architecture and EA in an evolutionary time perspective. The traditional architecture has evolved for many hundred years, whereas the organizational architecture and not least EA, is quite recent in comparison. The EA has been inspired by the traditional architecture of built environment where several artifacts and terms are copied from this discipline. The evolutionary history of traditional architecture has evolved for a long time to improve the knowledgebase successively while the organizational architecture and EA have a shortage of historical record of accomplishment. There is a need for inherited knowledge to create the future experience to come, where the EA and the Enterprise Architect are omitted this guiding star and archetypes as the model for the next path in development.

Architecture of built environment

The art and science of designing building as architectural movements for the human race started when humans requested a shelter for protection, safety, and initial social interactions some 10,000 years ago. The evolving architectural knowledge continued from the ancient Mediterranean area 500 BC and has evolved over centuries to the state of the architecture of built environment which are present today (Wikipedia – Architecture, 2015). The architecture of built environment conforms three principles: firmitas (durability), utilitas (utility) and venustas (beauty) (Groat & Wang, 2013). The term architecture indicates “the chief builder” (Wikipedia – Architecture, 2015). The antic architect Vitruvius state the classic demand on building as commodity, firmness and delight, where Box (2007) argue: “We would have much better buildings if everyone would use this basic architectural test first” (p.91). In this light architecture could be considered as a simple test, a prerequisite in every new arrangement to build, framing the field of Enterprise Architecture as well. Besides, Barnes (2000) reflects Aristotle’s view on design and architecture as representing the finished and completed sciences.

Organizational Architecture

The way of designing the organizational architecture is described by Galbraith (2014), involving functional archetypes (Cichocki & Irwin, 2014) and dimensions of organizational architecture (Eikelenboom, 2005), whereas the organizational spatial space is described by Hernes (2004).

Enterprise Architecture

The Enterprise Architecture (EA) was introduced by John Zachman as Framework for Information System Architecture in 1987 (Zachman, 1987), with the primary objective to generate alignment between the business and IT within an organization (Langenberg & Wegmann, 2004).

Figure 9. The evolution of architecture in a timeline comparison

This subsection has the aim to compare the evolution of architecture of built environment, organizational architecture and EA in an effort to claim the EA as rather new compared to the other architectures. The next subsection relates EA to other architectures in a horizontal view.

Types of architectures in the field of IT Management, horizontal view

The contemporary literature in the field of EA could be grouped into three clusters: Literature that mainly will consider EA as emerging from and strictly related to the IT (department) business. On the other flank, literature that concentrates on the business needs. For some, the balance between IT and business is an essential property distinctly expressed, whereas rarely declared how this balance is articulated in reality.

In the field of IT Management, several architectures are present. This study focuses the Enterprise Architecture (EA) within the field of IT Management, and on reference purpose, the adjacent architectures. Emanating from the business domain with a similar aim and objective as the EA is the Enterprise Business Architecture (Whittle & Myrick, 2005) and Business Architecture (Whelan & Meaden, 2012). Other authors, such as Whittle & Myrick (2005) term a similar architecture as Corporate Architecture. Emanating from the IT domain with a similar aim and objective is the Enterprise IT Architecture, though with a distinct IT bias (Perks & Beveridge, 2004). The EA constitutes by the business architecture, considering the people, structure and business processes, and the technical architecture involving the applications, the frameworks and the technical infrastructure (Kappelman, 2009).

Table 3. The Enterprise Architecture position.

The horizontal architectures in relation to the EA are the more IT-intensive Enterprise IT Architecture while the Enterprise Business Architecture is representing the bias towards the business view. The next subsection explores the variety of architectures the Enterprise Architect most likely will interrelate with in a collaborative environment.

Types of architectures in the field of IT Management, vertical view

Within the field of EA, there are some closely related architectures established which an Enterprise Architect will interact with. The initial part will define which architectures that are mentioned by the EA regarded literature as essential to the EA, and the second part, a short description of common architectures are provided.

As vertically interacting with the EA, among others, are the application architecture, capability architecture, solution architecture, the information architecture, the data architecture, and transition architecture (The Open Group, 2011). In addition, Ackerman (2002) mention the infrastructure architecture. Simon (2015) reveals the data architecture as increasing prominence during the big data era while Resmini (2014) considers the information architecture for reframing. Faircloth (2014b) adds the cloud-based architecture as noteworthy for the present organization.

(Strategic) Capability Architecture:

The Capability Architecture is intended to strengthen the business’ competitive advantage, in creating and continuously improving the organizational infrastructure of capabilities with an aim to obtain pluralistic goals (King, 1995).

Business Architecture:

Business Architecture offers a technique visualizing the components to describe a business and its organization (Whelan & Meaden, 2012). Akenine et al. (2014) argue a comprehensive deviancy in the Swedish interpretation of the Business Architecture.

Information Architecture:

Resmini (2014) defines Information Architecture as the information spaces of design contrasting its cultural, social, and technological domains, considering the interactions between these domains. The Information Architecture describes the interactions between the information stakeholders, users and information designer, interpreting explicit and tacit knowledge (Resmini, 2014). Xu (2015) reflects EA as the methodology that interprets and translates Business Architecture and Information Architecture needs to IT. The need for a proper Information Architecture to obtain enterprise integration is stressed by Xu (2015).

Data Architecture:

Data Architecture labels how the business data storage are organized and accessed, and is considered as the heart of business functionality by Tupper (2011). Several sub-architectures to Data Architecture are present: the data warehousing requesting Relational DBMS Architecture and MapReduce Architecture (Kimball & Ross, 2013) such as Hadoop (Perera & Gunarathne, 2013) involved in Big Data Architecture (Sawant & Shah, 2013) considered by Davenport (2014) to be designed to obtain a key strategic capability as the first order of business. For the Enterprise Architect, the emerging field of Master Data Management (MDM) as part of the Data Architecture, is of particular interest (Cervo, 2011).

Information Technology Architecture:

Information Technology Architecture provides the models, guidelines and specifications to take advantage of information technology for the business (Hausman & Cook, 2011). Revealed from a literature survey, Information Technology Architecture could be considered in the context of the EA (Perks & Beveridge, 2004), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) (Bonnet et al., 2009) or Uniform Markup Language (UML) (Duffy, 2004). Akenine et al. (2014) state that Information Technology Architecture comprises the EA, Business Architecture, Solution Architecture, and Software Architecture.

Solution Architecture:

Akenine et al. (2014) define Solution Architecture as the architecture that will plan for the IT solution of a business request to solve a business issue while the solution could embrace several (IT) systems. The Solution Architecture literature seems mainly to be related to a specific software vendor, such as Microsoft (Prendergast, 1999).

Application Architecture:

The Application Architecture describes the applications utilized by a business, their behavior, its structure, and their interactions that are perceived by the users or systems. When Solution Architecture design is finished, the Application Architecture is the next step (Faircloth, 2014a). The Application Architecture comprises the architectural components as layers, stack, software development kit and the application at the top level (Mahnke & Leitner, 2009).

Software Architecture:

The Software Architecture involves frameworks, tools and methods to establish a high level structure of a software as a system, involving the architectural knowledge to create these structures, its design and its lifetime administration (Akenine et al., 2014). Mistrik et al. (2014) argue the various implications of cost structure, related to Software Architecture as lifetime cost while Babar et al. (2014) claim the agile architecture of software development.

Hardware Architecture:

The Hardware Architecture defines a hardware system’s physical components and their relationships (Wikipedia – Hardware Architecture, 2015), e.g. the computer processor’s components and interrelations (Arora, 2012).

Integration Architecture:

Integration Architecture incorporates the Business Architecture, Process Architecture, Hardware Architecture and Software Architecture as part of the EA, offering a multilayer architecture (Xu, 2015). The Integration Architecture is requesting implements such as the Enterprise Service Bus (Chappell, 2008) and Service-Oriented Architecture (Dikmans & Luttikhuizen van, 2012).

Infrastructure Architecture:

Infrastructure Architecture is revealed as synonymously to Technical Architecture (Murer et al., 2011a).

Technical Architecture:

The Technical Architecture involves all elements of IT infrastructure as the hardware, software, databases, network equipment, including middleware components, independently what purpose the system is intended for (Murer et al., 2011b). Booch (2010) indicates there is a common misunderstanding in equalizing the Technical Architecture with EA though both must co-exist. The Technical Architecture involves architectures such as the Internet Architecture (Schewick van, 2010), Server Architectures (Chevance, 2005), and Network System’s Architecture (Serpanos & Wolf, 2011). The term is often mention but revealed as infrequently defined.

Systems Architecture:

Systems Architecture defines the structure of a system components, their relations, internal and external interrelations and their behaviors (Sangwan, 2015).

(Enterprise) Information Security Architecture:

The Information Security Architecture provide methods to describe the structure and behavior for an organization’s security processes, comprehending infrastructure, security baselines, policy, standards and procedures, and the important part of users’ awareness and training (Killmeyer, 2006).

Cloud-based Architecture / Cloud Application Architecture:

The Cloud-based Architecture defines the various components and their relations required for cloud-based computing (Reese, 2009).

Process Architecture:

Harmon (2007) describes Process Architectures as the interrelation and structures of the organizational business processes, aligning resources, managers and measures while (Babar et al., 2014) align the Process Architecture with Software Architecture in the context of being agile.

Transition Architecture:

The Transition Architecture describes the business in progress from its baseline architecture to its targeted architecture (The Open Group, 2011).

In summary of this subsection, the Enterprise Architect is supposed to interact with a selection of architectures in the IS/IT domain. From an academic literature perspective, the deviation in the available literature regarding the architectures listed above is noticeable. Revealed from the architectural literature research, each architecture is commonly considered as a “closed” domain where the interactions between the architectures, sharing models, tools and documentations, are vaguely described. This will affect the Enterprise Architect in a weakened holistic outlook of how these architectures operate within the business, combined with that an alteration to one architecture will most likely influence another architecture. This comprehensive and holistic view, from a business perspective, has not been confirmed by this literature study of the EA related architectural academic literature. The next section will address the circumstances in a particular interest for this study: The Enterprise Architecture.

Go to Enterprise Architecture

Page references:

Ackerman, L. D. (2002). Managing IT infrastructure standardisation in the networked manufacturing firm. Int. J. Productions Economics 75, ss: 213-228.

Akenine, D., Kammerfors, E., Toftefors, J., Olsson, S.-H., Folkesson, R., Berg, C., . . . Nedstam, A. (2014). Boken om IT-arkitektur. Helsingborg: Hoi Förlag.

Arora, M. (2012). The art of hardware architecture: design methods and techniques for digital circuits. New York: Springer Science + Business Media, LLC.

Babar, M. A., Brown, A. W., & Mistrik, I. (2014). Agile Software Architecture: Aligning Agile Process and Software Architectures.

Barnes, J. (2000). Aristotle: a very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bonnet, P., Detavernier, J.-M., & Vauquier, D. (2009). The sustainable IT architecture: the progressive way of overhauling information systems with SOA. Hoboken, NJ; London: ISTE.

Booch, G. (2010). Enterprise Architecture and Technical Architecture. IEEE Software, 27(2), ss: 96-96, doi:10.1109/MS.2010.42.

Box, H. (2007). Think like an architect. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Cervo, D. (2011). Master data management in practice achieving true customer MDM. Hoboken, N.J.: Hoboken, N.J: Wiley.

Chappell, D. A. (2008). Enterprise Service Bus: O’Reilly.