Enterprise Architecture – from Blueprints to Design Services

This paper looks at the evolution of Enterprise Architecture modeling and use, since its birth in the late 1970’s, then looks at the role of architectures in leading companies today, and finally developments to add more value to past investments are presented and discussed. Until recently enterprise architecture projects have been focused on business and systems information gathering and presentation, primarily providing document services to managers. With new advances in active knowledge modeling and in integrated service architectures many initiatives are started addressing all enterprise knowledge layers. The main purpose of these initiatives is to integrate active knowledge models, improve view handling, provide model-driven usercomposed services, and support dynamic architecture driven solutions. Finally new approaches to innovative design, whether the focus is on product, organization, process, system or new enterprises are presented. Enterprise Architecture is not just about technology, so in the future we must include social and human aspects and integrate the architecture of the human mind and develop new forms of organizational structures. prise systems, has emerged as a ‘tool’ to help stakeholders manage system engineering and IT change. But EA is not only an IT issue, but influences business, organizations, products, and strategies. In spite of all the great things that architectures can provide to business managers, IT people, enterprise planners and stakeholders, there are still severe shortcomings in the architecture modeling approaches and techniques. Many architecture frameworks have been developed to address different aspects of architecture development, but frameworks can not support design and team-working [18]. 1.2 EA blueprint approaches Most current EA approaches are information gathering, filling in views that are used as blueprints to document the legacy [10]. Examples of such frameworks are: Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) [1], Treasury Enterprise Architecture Framework [2], The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF) [3], Generalized Enterprise Architecture and Methodology (GERAM) [4] and the Zachman Framework [5]. Shortcomings of these frameworks are that they tend to be documentation-heavy or process-heavy, they do not provide operational support; they do not provide customer knowledge services nor support knowledge activation, and they are not suitable to smallmedium-enterprises (SMEs) [18].