Enterprise Architecture

Assessing the need for EA

Extract from a paper presented by Dennis A Stevenson to the Department of Information Systems, University of Cape Town , in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Commerce in Information Systems, June 1995. Copyright subsists in this material.

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Assessing the need for EA

The need was expressed above (see Business Process Reengineering ) for the architecture to be able to record both a current view of the business as well as the future desired state. The current view is required for the operational management of the business and well as for continuous improvement efforts. The future view is required for broad scope, radical redesign of the enterprise.

However not every business requires a full Enterprise Architecture, and those that do, do not all require both views.

One way to distinguish the strategic need for architecture is to position the organisation on McFarlan’s (1984) grid. This is not a completely reliable guide as it has a systems bias, but it is a useful indicator.

Figure 3: McFarlan’s Grid (1984)

The result from McFarlan’s grid can now be mapped against the following table:

Figure 4: Assessing the need for Enterprise Architecture

There is scope for research into the design of more holistic means of determining the need for architecture.

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