What is Enterprise Architecture?
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a conceptual idea that identifies solutions to satisfy academic and administrative objectives. It minimizes purchase, development, deployment and operational costs by emphasizing re-use of existing systems, or choice of scalable new systems that are flexible enough to be extended to meet the needs of a variety of departments and divisions.
Why do we need Enterprise Architecture?
- Enterprise Architecture (EA) identifies solutions to satisfy academic and administrative objectives
- Enterprise Architects take a broad view, like city planners
What Does Enterprise Architecture do?
EA minimizes purchase, development, deployment and operational costs by emphasizing
- re-use of existing systems
- choice of scalable new systems
that are flexible enough to be extended to meet the needs of a variety of departments and divisions.
How does EA achieving its goals?
EA does the following:
- Inform and enable IT governance
- Provide standards, principles and guidelines to the IT project portfolio
- Facilitate, lower cost, and address scalability for IT integration projects
- Promote and enable process agility using Services Oriented Architecture
- Enable and illustrate IT communications and transparency
- Guide and enable cost management and consolidation
When do you need EA?
If you’re considering any large (costly) and/or complex/critical IT initiative that requires data from any of the central ITS systems (e.g. ROSI), consider engaging an Enterprise Architect for a quick consultation to determine if some additional forward thinking would be beneficial.
Who do you contact?
Frank Boshoff
More Details?
EA is guided by a set of EA principles.
Without a set of guiding principles, anyone can unduly criticize any design, or arbitrarily move the basic design objectives to suit personal or other agendas. A design that does not abide by the principles should be modified to conform to at least a few of them before implementation. Solutions that do not conform will typically require more effort/cost to operate and usually have shorter lifespans than solutions that do conform.
The principles have been grouped into related sets, as described in the tabs to the left:
- Academic and Administrative Principles
- Data Principles
- Application Architecture Principles
- Technology Principles
The principles originated in The Open Group, and have been adapted to relate to the U of T environment.
Trademarks
TOGAF™ and Boundaryless Information Flow™ are trademarks and UNIX® and The Open Group® are registered trademarks of The Open Group in the United States and other countries.