How to get started with Enterprise Architecture? Looking at enterprise from IT perspective. Part 3/4

An optimal way to start creating enterprise architecture (EA) work is first to look at it from the business viewpoint. But what if you don’t have time or the possibility to do so but you are given a straightforward task, say, to either harmonize your IT application landscape and reduce some IT costs or change technology behind the applications, or even both? In this kind of case, chances are you don’t have the luxury of time. In spite of this, if you are going to cut the power from some ICT systems, servers or services, it would be nice to know from whom you are cutting down those services and how does it affect business operations and processes continuity.

If the only thing you know of your enterprise architecture is a list of ICT systems and their names, and you are lacking the knowledge of business process architecture, I’d say now is a good time to start your EA work by not only making a system acronym list of those ICT system names, but also understand functionality of those ICT systems and what kind of information they are dealing with. In an ideal situation you would also know who the users are of those applications, so you could at least ask them about the functionalities and data usage – the so called use cases.

If you are in a hurry to do something with your IT application’s architecture, this kind of quick use case walkthrough of applications, information assets and related functionalities would be your first action point when starting with EA. Later on, when the dust has settled and you have managed to solve your IT application and/or technology issues at least for a while, I’d suggest that you continue and expand your EA work by connecting those application use cases to business processes. If you don’t have business processes defined by the business, use instead some industry standard process framework close to your organization’s business area. They might provide a good starting point for process architecture development anyhow.

In a perfect world, your enterprise architecture work would have started from organization’s business strategy, operations and business information topics, and you would also most probably have a good understanding of your business processes which show how your organization is running its business. If this would be your starting point, connecting IT to business architecture would be a piece of cake. If that business architecture layer is missing, you can still start EA work from the application and technology side using information usage and use cases as linking glue.

Ari Anturaniemi
Chief Consultant, Enterprise Architecture

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