What Is an Enterprise Architecture Framework?

Enterprise Architecture (EA). It refers to the universal solution provided for the systematic and universal problems in the enterprise business information management system. More specifically, it is based on business-oriented and driven architecture to understand, analyze, design, build, integrate, extend, Operation and management information systems. The key to complex system integration is architecture (or system) -based integration, not component (or component) -based integration.

Enterprise architecture

(Chinese name for Enterprise Architecture)

It can be divided into two parts: business architecture and IT architecture. Most enterprise architecture methods have evolved from IT architecture.

Business structure: It is a channel that transforms an enterprise's business strategy into daily operations. The business strategy determines the business structure. It includes the business operation mode, process system, organizational structure, and geographical distribution.

IT architecture: The IT framework that guides IT investment and design decisions is a comprehensive blueprint for building enterprise information systems, including data architecture, application architecture, and technology architecture.

Compared with RUP and other disciplines that are mainly focused on implementation, the principle focus in the field of enterprise architecture is the identification, specification, and prioritization of business requirements within the enterprise. In my opinion, there is a difference between making a tool-type product and an enterprise-level product, that is, making an enterprise-level product requires a transformation from a product-type company of a tool-type product to a consulting-type service company.

The earliest ideas of enterprise architecture came from

The purpose of enterprise architecture is to optimize cross-enterprise and often fragmented legacy processes (manual / automatic) into an integrated environment, which can respond to changes in a timely manner and effectively support the delivery of business strategies.

Today's CEO knows that effective management and use of information through IT is a key factor in business success and an indispensable means of gaining a competitive advantage. Enterprise architecture is able to handle this need and provide a strategic context for the evolution of IT systems required to respond to a continuously changing business environment.

In addition, a good system architecture allows you to strike the right balance between IT efficiency and business innovation. It allows individual business units to safely innovate while pursuing a competitive advantage. At the same time, it ensures that the organization's need for an integrated IT strategy can be met and allows the closest possible collaboration and collaboration across the entire extended enterprise.

The advantages derived from good corporate architecture can bring important business benefits, which are clearly visible in the profits or losses of a company or organization:

More efficient IT operation

Reduced software development, support and maintenance costs

Enhanced application portability

Improved interoperability and simpler system and network management

Improved ability to deal with critical, enterprise-wide issues, such as security

Easier upgrades and replacement of system components

Better returns on existing investments and lower risk of future investments

Reduced complexity of IT infrastructure

Existing IT

There are many approaches to enterprise architecture, but TOGAF is the most mainstream. Not only 80% of Forbes' top 50 companies in the world are using it, but it also supports an open, standard SOA reference architecture. Enterprise architecture planning most often uses the TOGAF architecture approach. TOGAF architecture development method ADM is a reliable and proven method to develop enterprise architecture that can meet the business needs of enterprises.

1. Preparation stage

This phase focuses on the preparations and initial activities required to meet the business guidance of the new enterprise architecture, and at this stage, service-oriented principles should be adopted. This will help the two additional outputs of this phase-governance and support strategies, and the initial architecture library to adapt to each other.

Architecture vision

This phase focuses on vision, scope, business drivers, and readiness assessments. The scale of the architecture project, the stakeholders, and the architecture view need to be defined at this stage.

3. Business architecture

This phase focuses on business architecture aspects such as people, processes, and functions. A baseline and target business architecture needs to be developed at this stage, and a gap analysis to support the existing architecture view is needed.

4. Information system architecture

This phase addresses application and data architecture issues. Need to develop benchmarks and information system architectures, conduct gap analysis to support existing architecture views, architect information system services, and associate them with business services.

5.Technical architecture

This phase defines the software and hardware infrastructure required by the architecture. When defining technologies, the SOA reference model should be used.

Opportunities and solutions

This phase focuses on the initial implementation plan and then identifies the delivery tools for the architecture defined in the previous phase. Solution portfolio, integration, and management, as well as internal or external service provider validation, are completed at this stage.

7. Migration planning

The focus of this phase is to use a supporting previous stage confirmation plan to build a detailed series of transition architectures and work with the project implementation team to create a viable implementation and migration.

8.Implement governance

This phase focuses on the implementation of structural supervision. Architecture implementation should adhere to the TOGAF and SOA governance and strategy models defined in the previous stages.

9.Architecture change management

This phase focuses on change management for the new architecture and helps consider adopting object-oriented principles. The goal of architecture change management is to ensure that the architecture can achieve its original target business value. This goal includes managing architectural changes in a compact architectural manner.

10. Demand management

Address all types of requirements, including significant business enablers, relationships, and new features and change requests. ^[1]

Why do you need enterprise architecture?

There are two main reasons why organizations need enterprise architecture:

1.Vital to business survival and success

An effective enterprise architecture is vital to the survival and success of an enterprise, making it an indispensable means to gain competitive advantage through IT. Today, CEOs have realized that the effective management and use of information through IT is the key to business success. Enterprise architecture precisely solves this problem. It provides a strategic context for the evolution of enterprise IT systems and enables enterprises to respond to changing business environments.

2. Make enterprise innovation manageable

Enterprise architecture enables you to balance the relationship between IT efficiency and business innovation and manage innovation. Each business unit can innovate steadily to gain its own competitive advantage. At the same time, it can ensure the organization's comprehensive IT strategy needs and achieve the closest collaboration within the enterprise.

What motivates us to develop an enterprise architecture?

Typically, an enterprise architecture is developed because key people within the organization have the attention that needs to be handled through the IT system. These people are often referred to as "stakeholders" in the system. The role of the architect is to deal with these concerns, by identifying and refining the needs of stakeholders, developing an architectural view that shows how concerns and requirements will be addressed, and showing how to reconcile potentially conflicting concerns between different stakeholders Out of the trade-offs.

Without an enterprise architecture, it is extremely impossible to consider and meet all of these concerns and needs.

In recent years, with the deepening of the enterprise informatization, how to establish an effective mechanism to integrate IT and business, that is, to generate corresponding business value through better IT operations and improve core competitiveness has become an urgent issue for enterprises. An Enterprise Architecture (EA) that combines strategic development, business, and IT systems has emerged.

Enterprise architecture has a long history and there are many successful cases in Europe and the United States. The most successful practice is that the corporate structure is included in the European and American governments' bills. Practice has shown that EA can help enterprises to maximize IT benefits, and through business architecture blueprints, avoid repeated investment and information silos. However, at present, Chinese companies are still in the learning and exploration stage of EA's understanding and specific practice. Only a few companies have completely adopted the methods and ideas of enterprise architecture design for planning, implementation and management of IT systems. It will take time for Chinese enterprises to truly mature in informationization. Enterprise structure is of great significance in the introduction, promotion and promotion of Chinese enterprises or governments.

Reasons for choosing TOGAF as an enterprise architecture framework

TOGAF is an architectural framework, in short, a tool to assist in the development, acceptance, operation, use, and maintenance of the architecture. TOGAF is used by 80% of Forbes 50 companies and supports an open, standard SOA reference architecture.

The Open Group began to formulate standards for system architecture at the request of customers in 1993 and published The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) in 1995. TOGAF is based on the US Department of Defense's Technical Architecture for Information Management (TAFIM). It is based on an iterative process model that supports best practices and a set of reusable existing architecture assets. It lets you design, evaluate, and build the right structure for your organization. The key to TOGAF is the Architecture Development Method (ADM): a reliable and proven method to develop an enterprise architecture that meets business needs.

Enterprise Architecture Basic Information

The Open Group (Chinese: Open Group) is very authoritative in terms of system architecture standards. Here is a brief introduction:

The Open Group is an international authority on system architecture standards. It has formulated the TOGAF enterprise architecture structure. The following is an introduction of The Open Group:

The Open Group is a vendor-neutral and technology-neutral organization. The Open Group's vision is to achieve Boundaryless Information Flow (amp; # 8482;). Based on open standards and global interoperability, The Open Group is committed to enabling access to integrated information within and between companies.

The Open Group works with customers, suppliers, alliances, and other standards bodies. Its role is to capture, understand, and handle current and emerging needs, establish response strategies, and share best practices; promote interoperability, promote consensus, develop and integrate various specifications and open source technologies; and provide a comprehensive set of comprehensive Services to enhance the efficiency of the association's operations; and to operate the industry's premier certification service.

The Open Group has more than 20 years of standards development and promotion history. In 1996, it was formed by the merger of X / Open and the Open Software Foundation. The Open Group is best known as a certification body for the UNIX trademark. Its published Single UNIX Specification not only expands the POSIX standard but also becomes the official definition of UNIX. The Open Group members include users, suppliers and government agencies, such as Capgemini, HP, IBM, SAP, ORACLE, Kingdee, etc.

The Open Group has different forums to develop different standards. There are different Work Groups under the forum to ensure that the field always contains the latest technology standards. The most famous of these is the Architecture Forum and the SOA Working Group, which is responsible for formulating The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) architecture framework and related specifications and standards for SOA.

Enterprise Architecture China Chapter

In 2009, the Open Group China Chapter was established. As the founder of the Open Group China Chapter, Kingdee represents the Asia Pacific region on the board of The Open Group, and participates in the development of IT standards with Capgemini, HP, IBM, Oracle, SAP and other multinational companies and IT industry leaders. Conducive to helping companies in the world, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, based on open standards and global collaboration, to take full advantage of integrated information within and between companies, and improve their competitiveness.

The Open Group China Chapter is responsible for recruiting open group members in Greater China, introducing international corporate architecture, cloud computing reference architecture, SOA reference architecture, information security, distributed system management, software reliability, trusted technology supply chain security framework, etc. Standards and successful implementation cases of members of The Open Group worldwide help Chinese enterprises to promote business planning and information construction with enterprise architecture, cloud computing and SOA reference architecture, and help Chinese enterprises to comprehensively improve their information planning and implementation capabilities.

At the same time, the Open Group China Chapter will also provide standards, information, resources and certification services provided by The Open Group to IT and enterprise architecture groups in China, and actively promote the innovation activities and various affairs of local IT professionals, including Manage the Chinese version of cloud computing reference architecture, SOA reference architecture, SOA service maturity model, The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), provide Chinese training and professional certification, assist enterprise internal training and universities to develop corporate architecture courses, and IT architects and IT Professional services such as experts.

From 2010 to 2011, the Open Group China Chapter united companies, universities, research institutions and other multiple forces to carry out various activities around the corporate structure and was committed to promoting the concept of "borderless information flow" in China. One of the highlights was the "2010 North American Management Innovation Exploration Journey" held in July 2010. The China Chapter led the CIO group of Chinese companies and participated in the Open Group Conference held in Boston, USA. Visited Jeanne Ross, chief scientist of MIT Sloan School of Management, a master of global enterprise architecture, and learned how to design the basis of enterprise IT execution (core business processes and infrastructure) according to the operating model and enterprise architecture.

The second highlight was the "China Management Cloud Conference & 2011 Open Group China Annual Conference" held in China for the first time in May 2011. The conference attracted nearly 800 well-known scholars, senior managers of enterprises, IT industry experts, and representatives of consulting organizations. . Allen Brown, chairman of The Open Group, Chen Guoliang, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, deputy director of the Information Department of China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group, and executive vice president of Shenzhen CIO Association Zou Lailong attended the conference.