A Big-Picture Look at Enterprise Architectures

I t’s rare that a business stays just as it began year after year.So if we agree that businesses evolve, it follows that information systems must evolve to keep pace.So far,so good.The disconnect occurs when an enterprise’s management knows that the information systems must evolve,but keeps patching and whipping the legacy systems to meet one more requirement. If you put the problem in its simplest terms,management has a choice about how it will grow its information systems.If there is a clear strategic vision for the enterprise, it seems logical to have an equally broad vision for the systems that support that strategy. Managers can thus choose to plan evolution,or they can react when reality hits and “evolve”parts of the information system according to the latest crisis. It’s a bit of a no-brainer as to which is the better choice. But it’s also easy to understand why few enterprises pick it. Conceiving, planning, and monitoring systems that support a long-range strategic vision is not trivial. Enterprise-wide information systems typically start from a base of legacy systems.And not just any legacy systems.They are typically unwieldy systems of systems with a staggering array of hardware,software, design strategies, and implementation platforms. To make the job even more difficult, “enterprise-wide” often means city to city, state to state, or even country to country. Getting these pieces to seamlessly interact and evolve according to long-range strategic business objectives may seem like mission impossible; for a large distributed organization,however, it is mission critical.