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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"The leaders of the organisation must have a clear vision of the desired future state of the entire system, including such dimensions as its business, its organisation and its ways of working. This vision must be used as a common context both for diagnosing the needs for changes and for managing the process of change, so that it acts as an integrating force for the multitude of apparently disparate changes to be made. The plan for making changes must be an integrated one." (Beckhard and Pritchard, 1992))
In a large modern enterprise, a rigorously defined framework is necessary to be able to capture a vision of the "entire system" in all it's dimensions and complexity. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a framework which is able to coordinate the many facets that make up the fundamental essence of an enterprise. It is the master plan which "acts as an integrating force" between aspects of business planning such as goals, visions, strategies and governance principles; aspects of business operations such as business terms, organisation structures, processes and data; aspects of automation such as application systems and databases; and the enabling technological infrastructure of the business such as computers, operating systems and networks.
"Enterprise models must be composed of rich, semantic descriptions of organizations" (Due', 1991). Taylor's (1990) more restricted view defines enterprise modeling as: "the process of building and using an organization's working model to understand the processes of that organization and to implement some of its functions in software."
"There is a parallel between (Enterprise) Architecture design and city planning. City planners must design in the face of many unknowns, such as future transportation technologies, changing work, living, and commuting patterns, and so on." "As a result of this level of planning, our major cities are able to accommodate new technologies for transportation and communication which remain viable for hundreds of years, and which make a major contribution to each city's brand of urban culture." (Nolan and Mulryan, 1987)
Saint-Exupery in one of his novels wrote: "As for the future, your task is not to foresee, but to enable it". In Enterprise Architecture as in city planning it is futile to attempt to foresee every possible future change. The architecture must rather provide the capability to enable change to occur rapidly, without undue resource utilisation, yet in a controlled manner and with minimal adverse impact.
A fundamental principle that can be applied to Enterprise Architecture, is: "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." (Saarinen, 1956)
Enterprise Architecture maps the design of the larger context (i.e. the enterprise) within which organisational design, business process reengineering, systems design, technology infrastructure design and data analysis, should be considered.
See
also: John
Zachman - "The Challenge is Change: A
Management Paper"
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