This book provides a method to plan, develop, validate, or evolve the design of an enterprise architecture function so that it fully meets the organization’s needs. The reader will benefit from this book in two ways. First, it provides a structured overview and orientation to the subject of architecture from an architecture function perspective. Second, it guides through the process of planning, building, and operating your own architecture organization based on a generic architecture function blueprint presented in the form of a pattern language offering a structured means for navigating, contextualizing, combining, and composing the architecture function patterns. The book is structured in six chapters. Chapter 1 “Introduction” explains the starting position and objectives of the book and introduces key concepts that will be explained further in subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 “Architecture Function Pattern Language” introduces the concepts of pattern, pattern catalogue, pattern topology, and ontology and explains how these concepts are combined to form a pattern language for planning, designing, and operating an architecture function. Next, Chapter 3 “Architecture Function – Context“ introduces concepts that are crucial for understanding the challenges that an architecture function faces and presents a generic schema for the business organizations and value chain. Chapter 4 “Architecture Function – Challenge” looks at an architecture function from a black box perspective and outlines the expectations and requirements that companies place on architecture organizations. It discusses the building blocks of an architecture function, the services it provides along the enterprise value chain, and the quality attributes that enterprises expect from their functions. Chapter 5 “Architecture Function – Constitution” then shifts from a black-box perspective to a white-box perspective and outlines the generic design of an architecture function in order to realize functional and quality-related requirements. Chapter 6 “Pattern Catalogue“ eventually introduces the pattern catalogue with a total of 48 architecture function patterns. These patterns suggest designs for collaboration between the architecture function and enterprise organizations, for the elaboration and development of enterprise services along the enterprise value chain, or for aligning architecture governance with enterprise governance. The book is intended for a broad readership, including enterprise, domain, and solution architects, lecturers and students, and anyone else interested in understanding the value proposition, responsibilities, outcomes, methods, and practices of architecture functions. It introduces the basic concepts and theories needed to understand the pattern language presented and the patterns it summarizes.

This book provides practical advice on how to develop an enterprise architecture practice. The authors developed different tools and models to support organizations in implementing and professionalizing an enterprise architecture function. Coverage applies these tools and models to a number of different organizations and, as a result, will help readers avoid potential pitfalls and achieve success with enterprise architecture.

The book attempts to answer a few of the common questions related to Enterprise Architecture (EA) and SOA. What are the issues? What is EA? Why should an organization consider EA? How to build the Enterprise Architecture and document it. What are the roadblocks, politics, governance, process and design method? How to measure the value deliverd by EA and its maturity and and how to select an Enterprise Architect? An innovative EA Framework, the associated metamodel and generic Enterprise Reference Maps (templates) for the business process, applications and infrastructure layers are proposed. The framework looks like a content page showing the chapters of a book or, in this case, the components of the Enterprise Architecture without actually describing them but showing how they fit into the whole. The book then identifies and summarises Best Practices in the Enterprise Architecture and SOA development, EA patterns, the integration to the mundane solution architecture, delivery checklistsÉ The book is intended to be a document summarising why and how to build an Enterprise Architecture.

An enterprise architecture tries to describe and control an organisation’s structure, processes, applications, systems and techniques in an integrated way. The unambiguous specification and description of components and their relationships in such an architecture requires a coherent architecture modelling language. Lankhorst and his co‐authors present such an enterprise modelling language that captures the complexity of architectural domains and their relations and allows the construction of integrated enterprise architecture models. They provide architects with concrete instruments that improve their architectural practice. As this is not enough, they additionally present techniques and heuristics for communicating with all relevant stakeholders about these architectures. Since an architecture model is useful not only for providing insight into the current or future situation but can also be used to evaluate the transition from ‘as‐is’ to ‘to‐be’, the authors also describe analysis methods for assessing both the qualitative impact of changes to an architecture and the quantitative aspects of architectures, such as performance and cost issues. The modelling language presented has been proven in practice in many real‐life case studies and has been adopted by The Open Group as an international standard. So this book is an ideal companion for enterprise IT or business architects in industry as well as for computer or management science students studying the field of enterprise architecture.

Based on an extensive study of the actual industry best practices, this book provides a systematic conceptual description of an EA practice and offers practically actionable answers to the key questions related to enterprise architecture.

Enterprises, from small to large, evolve continuously. As a result, their structures are transformed and extended continuously. Without some means of control, such changes are bound to lead to an overly complex, uncoordinated and heterogeneous environment that is hard to manage and hard to adapt to future changes. Enterprise architecture principles provide a means to direct transformations of enterprises. As a consequence, architecture principles should be seen as the cornerstones of any architecture. In this book, Greefhorst and Proper focus on the role of architecture principles. They provide both a theoretical and a practical perspective on architecture principles. The theoretical perspective involves a brief survey of the general concept of principle as well as an analysis of different flavors of principles. Architecture principles are regarded as a specific class of normative principles that direct the design of an enterprise, from the definition of its business to its supporting IT. The practical perspective on architecture principles is concerned with an approach to the formulation of architecture principles, as well as their actual use in organizations. To illustrate their use in practice, several real-life cases are discussed, an application of architecture principles in TOGAF is included, and a catalogue of example architecture principles is provided. With this broad coverage, the authors target students and researchers specializing in enterprise architecture or business information systems, as well as practitioners who want to understand the foundations underlying their practical daily work.

Enterprise architecture defines a firm's needs for standardized tasks, job roles, systems, infrastructure, and data in core business processes. This book explains enterprise architecture's vital role in enabling - or constraining - the execution of business strategy. It provides frameworks, case examples, and more.