Enterprise Architecture
What is it?
Enterprise Architecture is a methodology used by companies and organisations to provide ongoing alignment of their processes, information systems and personnel with the organisation’s goals and strategic direction.
Once adopted and put in place it becomes the technical foundation of its IT strategy and provides a technology plan for managing the enterprise wide IT investment.
Why do I need it?
Having architecture in place is critical to the survival and success of the modern business.
It provides CTOs, CIOs and CAOs (Chief Architecture Officer – a new and common term recently being adopted), with a practical and comprehensive method and set of tools to create and maintain control over the development and evolution of their information architecture, as a true support to the business goals and drivers.
We have often come across companies and organisations seeking to gain a common Enterprise Architecture framework across their departments enabling key architects to gain a holistic view of the business. PEAF and TOGAF™ provide the necessary framework and methodology to provide a substantial element of that requirement.
PEAF and TOGAF™ are also highly applicable when we come across the desire for processes to be mapped and “connected”, information to be transparent and “shared”, and for assets to be known and “reused”.
Typical reasons for adopting the “architectural” approach:
- Increased organisational complexity due to mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, internet, e-business or even outsourcing
- IT appears to have become too expensive or costs have escalated or cannot be controlled
- Customer Services levels have dropped or cannot be maintained
- Business is not being properly supported by IT leading to loss of competitive edge – an impact felt severely when business innovations “time-to-market” is heavily extended
- Lack of IT clarity regarding business change
The Benefits
Those companies and organisations, both public and private, who have adopted an architecture approach, have reported the following business benefits:
- A more efficient IT operation
- Better return on existing IT investment and reduced risk for future IT investment
- Faster, simpler and cheaper procurement
- Increased flexibility for business growth and restructuring
- Faster time-to-market for new products or even operational innovations
- Reduced business risk associated with IT
- Bridging of the business strategy & implementation gap
- More pertinent and relevant solutions for the business
PEAF
PEAF is published by Pragmatic EA Ltd who then issue licenses to companies such as EA Global to provide the global community with professional PEAF training services. We would like to think that EA Global’s approach to training and consultancy is innovative and client resource efficient.
PEAF is part of the Pragmatic family of Architecture Frameworks and is a vendor and consultancy independent, technology neutral, Enterprise Architecture Framework which allows organisations to kick start or re-start an EA initiative and provides a comprehensive set of products and processes of everything required to hit the ground running.
PEAF bridges the gap between minimal “EA Frameworks” which do not provide a complete set of what is required or huge monolithic “EA Frameworks” that are too difficult to understand and difficult to use. PEAF achieves this by “Cutting EA to the Bone”, and providing everything you need, and nothing you don’t.
Being FREE for use by end-user organisations and government bodies, its growth in popularity has been steep since its initial launch in November 2008.
Please visit www.PragmaticEA.com and start transforming your organisation today.
TOGAF™
TOGAF™ is an architectural framework – The Open Group Architectural Framework.
It’s a tool for developing a broad range of different IT architectures as well as utilising your existing architecture assets.
Most importantly it allows you to design, evaluate and build the right architecture for your organisation.
In this respect TOGAF™ is both business relevant and practical.
By using an architectural framework you will speed up and simplify architecture development, ensure more complete coverage of the designed solution and make certain that the architecture selected allows for future growth in response to the needs of the business.
TOGAF™ plays an important role in helping to demystify the architecture development process, enabling IT users to build genuinely open systems-based solutions to satisfy their business needs.
This is crucial because IT users who do not invest in IT architecture typically often find themselves pushed towards single-supplier solutions in order to ensure an integrated solution.
At that point, no matter how “open” any single supplier’s products may be in terms of adherence to standards, the user will be unable to realise the potential benefits of truly heterogeneous, multi-vendor open systems.
Why use EA Global?
EA Global has a standard policy of delivering relevant and appropriate, client focused, tailored PEAF and TOGAF™ Certification training. This allows organisations to swiftly embrace PEAF or TOGAF™ in their own working environment and culture saving huge amounts of time and money in developing the practice.
There are few in the business world who condone the practice of “try, fail and learn from mistakes” as a strategy. We would like to set you on the right road from the outset and make your architectural journey as painless as possible by applying our innovative approach to your training.
Having a PEAF or TOGAF™ certification alone does not make the individual an architect. Our consultants work with organisations around the globe, educating individuals and teams, with continuous appraisals and mentoring. We do not just “teach and leave” you, we work continuously towards educating our clients and delivering quality architecture solutions and services.
We practice what we teach – and have taught PEAF and TOGAF™ to some of the best architects in the world and have helped to educate their organisations along the way. We would like to help you – please contact us.