15.5 Enterprise architecture#
Enterprise architecture (EA) is a conceptual blueprint that defines the structure and operation of an organization whose role is to determine how the organization can most effectively achieve its current and future objectives.
EA maps the goals and priorities of an organization to Information Technology that is fit to support those goals as far as it can by managing information and delivering it accurately and in time where and when it is needed, and in a way that is cost-effective for the business. It seeks to guide the process of planning and designing the IT capabilities of an organization in order to guide them through the business, information, process, and technology changes necessary to meet desired organizational objectives.
EA helps enforce discipline and standardisation of business processes, and enable process consolidation, reuse, and integration. EA is basically designed for the whole system of systems across the “enterprise” - and like any design, it has to start from the business requirements and specify the best fit IT solutions. The IT part of EA is split into systems and data and finally infrastructure such as servers and networks.
There is an emerging trend of organizations using storage repositories that hold vast amounts of raw data in native format (‘Data Lakes’) from disparate sources. These data lakes are used to respond to business questions by linking and querying relevant data and thus require a new type of EA to manage such linked datasets.
Benefits to the NSO of a well-designed EA include achieving better business performance as per the business goals, reducing investment risk in IT. EA also facilitates a more agile enterprise by making the IT architecture more flexible to transform business models. Agile Architecture practices support the evolution of the design and architecture of a system while implementing new system capabilities thus allowing the architecture of a system to evolve incrementally over time while simultaneously supporting the needs of current users.
European Statistical System (ESS) Enterprise Architecture Reference Framework (🔗).
ISTAT project - Business Architecture model within an official statistical context (🔗).
Statistics Korea project - Building an Enterprise Architecture (🔗).
Statistics Poland project - Introducing Enterprise Architecture Framework (🔗).