Enterprise Architecture: An Introduction

Summary

In the video "Enterprise Architecture: An Introduction," Arron Rouse explains the significance of enterprise architecture (EA) as a means to understand a new enterprise before its establishment. He illustrates how business processes break down into sub-processes and procedures, emphasizing their role in determining costs and profitability. The video details components like key performance indicators (KPIs), value streams, and legislative requirements. Moreover, it underscores the integration of digital technology within modern enterprises, identifying the interplay between business processes, data, applications, and infrastructure. The roles of various architects, including business, data, solution, application, and infrastructure architects, are discussed in the framework of enterprise architecture. Rouse concludes by revisiting the Federation of Enterprise Architecture Professional Organizations' definition of EA as a holistic practice for analyzing, designing, planning, and implementing enterprise strategy.

Highlights

• Understanding a new enterprise through EA is like planning a building with blueprints. 🏠
• Business processes are dissected to align with strategic goals and understand financial implications. 💸
• Digital integration in processes supports the seamless flow of data and operations. 💻
• Architects specializing in business, data, applications, and technology play distinct roles in forming EA. 🛠️
• EA is dynamic, continuously evolving with stakeholder feedback and technological innovation. 🔄

Key Takeaways

• Enterprise architecture (EA) is crucial for understanding a business before it's built, much like architectural plans for a building. 🏗️
• Business processes, with procedures and sub-processes, are detailed to understand costs and profitability. 💡
• Integration of digital technology is vital in modern enterprises, linking processes, data, applications, and infrastructure. 🌐
• Various roles, from business architects to infrastructure architects, collaborate to develop and maintain the enterprise architecture. 👥
• EA uses a comprehensive approach to ensure strategies are executed effectively, meeting stakeholder expectations. 🎯

Overview

Enterprise architecture (EA) serves as a blueprint for understanding and building a business. Just as you wouldn't construct a skyscraper without architectural plans, EA ensures a company is thoughtfully planned and understood before launching. It's a strategic tool that aligns business processes, from high to micro-levels, ensuring every action, role, and resource has its place in the grand scheme. EA also marries these processes with financial realities, making it vital for determining a business’s paths to profitability and achievement of goals.

In today's tech-driven world, the importance of integrating digital technology into EA cannot be overstated. Processes that are supported by data and IT infrastructure allow for a seamless flow of information across the company. This digital backbone is crucial as it connects various business functions, enabling smoother operations and more efficient process management. It's the digital nervous system that keeps the business's heart beating correctly, providing real-time insights and control over business activities.

The role of architects—business, data, solution, and infrastructure—is pivotal in EA, each bringing their expertise to ensure the comprehensive development and maintenance of the architecture. They work in harmony, like an orchestra, ensuring that every element of the business works together. From setting strategic goals to implementing detailed technical structures, EA is a disciplined approach that offers clarity and a roadmap from present circumstances to future success. It's not static but a dynamic practice adapting constantly to business needs and technological advancements.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Enterprise Architecture The chapter introduces the concept of enterprise architecture, drawing an analogy to building architecture. It emphasizes that just as building architecture provides a blueprint for constructing a new building, enterprise architecture serves as a blueprint for creating a new enterprise. The chapter references a statement from the Federation of Enterprise Architecture Professional Organizations to underscore its significance. The goal of this chapter is to ensure a complete understanding of enterprise architecture, which is deemed essential to the core operations of any business.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Understanding Business Processes This chapter explains the intricacies of business processes and their classifications. Business processes are grouped into main processes and sub-processes, typically named in a way that makes sense to those managing them. Responsibilities for these processes are generally divided among departments or groups. As one delves deeper into the organization of these processes, they eventually lead to specific procedures, which are handled by individual personnel.
• 01:30 - 02:30: Role of Key Performance Indicators in Business Processes The chapter discusses how team procedures within a business utilize various resources and are often managed by specific roles targeting specific customer needs. It emphasizes the importance of understanding these resources as integral parts of business processes by acknowledging the costs associated with personnel and resource utilization. This understanding helps in identifying these resources as essential components of the process.
• 02:30 - 03:30: Strategic Development and Capability Planning The chapter discusses the importance of understanding costs and profitability in strategic development and capability planning. It emphasizes the need to measure essential activities in a procedure using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are reports provided to management to help them understand the performance of specific activities, and thus, the performance of specific processes. The chapter also highlights the integration of KPIs within processes as a crucial aspect of strategic planning.
• 03:30 - 05:30: Legislative Compliance and Risk Management In this chapter titled 'Legislative Compliance and Risk Management,' the focus is on the strategic development within an enterprise where senior stakeholders identify a new capability to develop. This involves creating a targeted website for specific customers, with a clear understanding of the responsible parties. To support this new capability, a set of essential processes, known as a value stream, is defined to ensure proper operation and alignment of the capability.
• 05:30 - 07:30: Integration of IT in Business Architecture The chapter discusses the integration of Information Technology into business architecture. It highlights the necessity of evaluating existing business processes to determine which ones require modification, removal, or addition. This involves identifying necessary procedures, resources needed, and activities that must be monitored. The goal is to successfully develop a strategy for seamless integration.
• 07:30 - 11:30: Role of Different Architect Roles This chapter discusses the role of different architecture roles in developing new strategies for an organization. It emphasizes the importance of attaching KPIs to activities to provide empirical proof of success towards strategic objectives. Furthermore, it explains how objectives, considered strategic by stakeholders, are often part of a more extensive enterprise-level objective.
• 11:30 - 13:00: Conclusion and Summary This chapter outlines the necessity for enterprises to comply with local laws and legislation. It mentions that the legislation can be divided into sections, subsections, clauses, and subclauses. It also suggests that any legislative requirements relevant to specific processes will be indicated alongside those processes and within specific procedures to ensure compliance.

Enterprise Architecture: An Introduction Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 just as building architecture helps us to understand a new building before it is built so enterprise architecture helps us to understand a new enterprise before it is built the Federation of enterprise architecture professional organizations has this to say about enterprise architecture by the end of this video you should understand this completely central to every business are its
• 00:30 - 01:00 processes process one needs to process two needs to process three those processes normally have names that make sense to the people who are running the business and within each of those processes there are further sub processes business processes that are a responsibility of a department or a group and as we go deeper into the sub processes eventually we get to procedures procedures are the responsibility of an individual or a
• 01:00 - 01:30 team procedures themselves may use additional resources within the company they may be run by a specific role aimed at specific customer produce specific documentation or use it and so on and because those resources are used within the procedure we get to understand that they are part of that process because we know the cost of the people involved in performing a process and the resources that are used
• 01:30 - 02:00 we can understand its costs and its profitability some activities are essential to the operation of a procedure and need to be measured here we've marked an activity with a key performance indicator a key performance indicator is simply a report that goes to management so that they can understand the performance of a specific activity and therefore the performance of a specific process and we would also mark the process as having keep it from its indicators within it as part of the
• 02:00 - 02:30 strategic development of the enterprise senior stakeholders may identify a new capability they wish to develop and they may understand that within that capability they're going to create a website that is aimed at a specific set of customers who will have items delivered to them and they understand who will actually run that new capability as part of that capability we will define a set of processes called a value stream these are the processes that are essential to the operation of the new capability in order to align the new capability
• 02:30 - 03:00 with our existing business process architecture we might identify which processes that are already existing need to change and if any need to be removed and whether any new processes need to be added within each of those processes we would identify what procedures need to be created what resources those procedures would use and which activities needed to be monitored so that we can ensure the successful development of the strategy which would then lead us to understand
• 03:00 - 03:30 how much it will cost to develop this new strategy as several of the activities have kpi's attached them they allow us to provide empirical proof that our strategy is successful and it is leading towards a strategic objective although our stakeholders considered the objective to be strategic it may be just one of several business objectives these objectives may themselves be part of a larger objective for the enterprise
• 03:30 - 04:00 every Enterprise in every country must follow the local laws at legislation can be broken down into sections subsections clauses and sub horses if a specific process has legislative requirements that must be followed we would show that next to the process and within specific procedures we may show that specific activities are
• 04:00 - 04:30 subject to the law and perhaps even that there are specific roles created by the law in highly regulated industries a process may not only have a legislative requirement but it may have a KPI to prove its compliance with that requirement risks are events that the enterprise would like to avoid when an activity has a risk associated with it we would show that on its diagram and we would also show it at the process level
• 04:30 - 05:00 so that management can understand that there is a risk event associated with that process to help the enterprise avoid risk events we would normally create a specific set of procedures called controls designed to prevent the risk and if the risk event does happen another set of controls the designed for the enterprise to recover from that risk event at the process level we would show that there is a risk event associated with the process but that we also have
• 05:00 - 05:30 controls in place to manage that risk so far we've only talked about the business architecture but a modern Enterprise is significantly digital that means that each process is supported by data and also may require information in order to operate correctly it's also important to understand that the messages that are transferred from process to process while they may be digital could also be manual
• 05:30 - 06:00 this allows us to understand when we look at our process architecture that while it is supported by data we can also help IT to understand that sometimes the data is transferred manually many of the activities in procedures will use applications when a user has entered data into an application that data is often passed to other applications to help other parts of the enterprise so we can see that this is almost
• 06:00 - 06:30 analogous that the date of its passed from process to process is very similar to the data that's passed application to application and sometimes they are indeed the same underlying our applications is the technical architecture formed by things like our servers or an enterprise application we may have multiple servers running significant applications that are supported by several databases
• 06:30 - 07:00 and we will also know the location of our data because we understand which servers are hosting which databases so because we understand which data and which applications are used in specific procedures because we understand where those procedures are our process architecture we get to understand which applications support which processes which means that we understand that the business processes are supported by data
• 07:00 - 07:30 that the business processes are supported by applications and that the business is supported by the infrastructure underlying both the data and the applications this allows us to understand that everything within the enterprise is linked so from our process we understand what procedures it contains who runs them what resources those procedures use and many indirect links from that process down through the enterprise and
• 07:30 - 08:00 into the IT this allows us to provide views of the architecture tailored to specific stakeholders for instance we get to understand which of our processes are a strategic importance which will be of interest to executives if the risk management team wants to know about data we understand where information is kept about risks within the enterprise and indeed whether there are any specific databases that might
• 08:00 - 08:30 themselves be subject to risk events we can also understand which of our procedures are there to control those risks because we understand the links between all of these what are called artifacts within the business architecture the data architecture the application and architecture and the technology we can define many implications from those artifacts and links for the data architecture team we
• 08:30 - 09:00 can give a complete view of the enterprise and because we understand that the processes have both automatic and manual transport of data between them through messages it's quite possible that we may discover that the implicit links between our databases mean that we can rearrange all of our data so that that way we can have a more efficient understanding of our data and it use it to a better effect all of these things add up to allow us
• 09:00 - 09:30 to understand the implications of change within an enterprise so for instance if a specific procedure has a legislative requirement and that procedure uses a specific set of applications that run on a specific set of servers it may well be that one of those servers is subject to legislation when an innovation is discovered that might cause a significant change to the enterprise such as a new type of application or a new type of resource we
• 09:30 - 10:00 can very quickly discover where within the enterprise the change needs to happen we can then put in place KPIs to ensure that we get a good return on investment and understand both the costs and profitability of the innovation a business architect works with business people to define the business architecture that includes processes and procedures the messages that travel
• 10:00 - 10:30 between them and in legislative requirements the business architect will also help to develop these strategic objectives and to understand any risks that need to be managed and controls that need to be put in place to manage them as the business architecture is developed a data architect will work with the business architects to define the data that is used that includes messages that go between the processes and procedures any data that is used
• 10:30 - 11:00 during the course of a process and any information that is needed in order for the process to succeed the data architect will use that work to move on to define any databases and the data structure to support both the data and information needs of the business architecture a solution architect will then work with the business architects and data architects to understand their needs so that appropriate applications can be acquired it may be that at this
• 11:00 - 11:30 point the work is handed off to an application architect if custom development is needed when the data and application architectures are suitably well defined the solution architect or application architect will work with an infrastructure architect in order to define the underlying technology the server's the networks and devices that will be used to support the data and applications lastly there is the Enterprise Architect who is responsible for the work of all of the other architects the business
• 11:30 - 12:00 architecture the data architecture the applications and the technology that support them and is also responsible for ensuring that all of those architectures meet the strategic goals of the enterprise and so we come back to the Federation of enterprise architecture professional organizations description of enterprise architecture EA is a well-defined practice for conducting enterprise analysis analysis because we are able to look at all of the enterprise Enterprise
• 12:00 - 12:30 design because we are able to design all of the enterprise planning because our designs can be passed through to project and program management in order to change the enterprise and implementation because we can use our plans and designs to ensure that the implementation matches what the senior stakeholders expected using a comprehensive approach at all times because we understand all aspects of the enterprise for the successful development and execution of strategy so
• 12:30 - 13:00 because we understand how to develop a strategy from its initial concept through to a detailed design we are able to execute it successfully and in a measured way this is not the first version in this video and it probably won't be the last if you have ideas for its improvement please leave a comment below