Enterprise architecture, implementation, and infrastructure management

Abstract

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a comprehensive model of an enterprise: a master plan, which acts as a planning, structuring, and integrating guideline and force for an organization. EA covers business structure and context, information technology dimension and organizational structure, and workflow dimension in achieving the organization's goals and strategies. It seeks to promote synergy between the various dimensions, aligned with achieving overall business purposes. While the concept of centralized business systems planning has become less popular, rapidly changing e-business environments, along with the more decentralized nature of the organizational resources, demand not only more flexible and adaptable but also cohesive and value creating role of information systems infrastructure and its management. In particular, synchronizing business goals and strategies; governance principles; organizational structures, processes and data; business applications, their systems and databases; and network infrastructure (internal and external to the enterprise) become more critical. However, planning, designing, operating, and controlling such a distributed system to ensure achieving the intended goals of an organization is often challenged and defeated by the immediacy of day-to-day problem solving caused by the factors often outside the control of management. Decentralization of network services, diverse architectural arrangement, and internal application demand make coherent and coordinated infrastructure management more difficult. Multi vendor environments as well as rapidly advancing technologies further complicate the problem.