第10章エンタープライズアーキテクチャーとソリューションアーキテクチャーの管理

Aligning business and technology strategies involves ensuring that goals and objectives of business and technology are supportive. How is it possible to align business and technology strategies?

EAM is a management practice that establishes, maintains, and uses a coherent set of guidelines, architecture principles, and governance regimes that provide direction and practical help in the design and development of an enterprise’s architecture to achieve its vision and strategy. EAM brings the highly distributed knowledge of all experts to the table and allows every participant to provide such knowledge and input in terms that best fit the experience and expectations of the contributing stakeholders.

EAM is important in every industry today. It plays a vital role in health care to handle unexpected challenges, such as those seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. By providing a framework that aligned business and IT strategies, EAM allowed hospitals and other medical organizations to quickly adapt to the crisis. EAM was used to manage supply chain disruptions, scale telemedicine services, and rapidly build respirators to ensure that health-care infrastructures were agile, resilient, and capable of maintaining high-quality care in the face of surprises.

As EA and EAM regard the enterprise as a large and complex system or system of systems,³ it is necessary to manage the scale and complexity of this system. To address this requirement, an enterprise architecture framework (EAF) provides tools and approaches that ensure that enterprise solutions are in alignment with the evolving vision and strategy of the organizations that use these solutions to operate and conduct day-to-day business. EAFs provide structured guidance that is divided into three main areas:

1. Descriptions of architecture: how to document the enterprise as a system

2. Methods for designing architecture: overarching enterprise architecture process composed of phases and broken into lower-level processes composed of finer-grained activities

3. Organization of architects: guidance on the team structure and the governance of the team, including the skills, experience, and training needed

To describe architectures, EAFs employ flexible data models built upon metamodels that provide evolving outlines for capabilities and relationships. At a high level, EAFs provide foundational principles, an organizing framework, a comprehensive and consistent method, and a set of governing processes and structures, as illustrated in Figure 10.20.

3 A single house is much like a single system—it has various types of architecture within it, and it exists within ever-larger ecosystems.

The reference architecture is built upon principles. A principle forms the foundational rules that guide its design and implementation. The reference architecture uses architectural terms as well as numerous principles, policies, and guidelines to govern the architecture. The framework serves as the organizing structure and outlines architectural domains and disciplines to ensure separation of concerns and alignment between business goals and IT. The method consists of defined, repeatable processes that ensure a consistent and controlled execution of the reference architecture. The processes and organizational structures that ensure adherence to the reference architecture are considered governance.

EAMs are found in common technologies and are used to ensure systems operate smoothly as user needs change. For example, home automation systems are often expanded, with the user requiring the ability to add new devices, such as a smart refrigerator or thermostat. However, the system needs to maintain compatibility with the existing devices it is connected to. EAFs provide structured guidelines to manage these changes, ensuring flexibility and scalability.

How can EAMs ensure seamless integration of new smart devices into your home system? How do EAFs help maintain flexibility in personal technology ecosystems?

As the practice of EA evolves, the supporting EAF frameworks that enable communities and enterprises to apply EA also evolve. Indeed, as solution complexity increases, the ingenuity needed to master it must continuously improve. In fact, architecture strategies keep playing an enormous and ever-increasing role in determining whether an enterprise is successful. The next generation of EAFs is focused on enabling the creation of dynamic ecosystems and related architectures that provide value for all business participants via systems of insight that integrate and facilitate decisions across systems of record (i.e., focus on costs), systems of operations/automation (i.e., focus on operational expense [Opex]), systems of design (i.e., focus on innovation), and systems of engagement (i.e., focus on customer experience). Figure 10.21 shows the evolution of EA frameworks that has taken place over the years.

The architecture subsumed by this new breed of ecosystems is illustrated in Figure 10.22. It relies on various layers that can be modeled (using next-generation EAFs) as follows:

• Trust models ensure that all participants within the ecosystem share and agree on additional values rather than just operate only for financial profits (e.g., respect privacy, guarantee security, provide customer-oriented value and social values, improve the level of quality) as well as shared outcomes, including externalities such as pollution or regulation.

• Business models ensure that the values identified in trust models are shared and business models can be established that split the margin and revenue between ecosystem participants.

• Orchestration models optimize the split of responsibilities and orchestrate services to deliver the best values for customers at the right price/quality (e.g., the links navigation digital experience journey or the knowledge flows journey maps to services and processes at the ecosystem level). Shared services models include supporting data and application services.

• Business networks enable the sharing of processes and data; for example, cloud applications shared between partners in digital business networks via a mix of shared and multitenancy architectures.

To provide adequate support, next-generation EAFs must supply an extensive set of generic capabilities as part of an underlying meta-framework. A meta-framework describes the framework in more detail, as illustrated in Figure 10.23. Clearly, these capabilities go beyond modeling and related features and must be spanned across EAF requirements for IT automation, IT governance, and IT context management. IT automation is the process of creating systems to reduce manual intervention. IT governance is the process that ensures the effective and efficient use of IT in enabling an organization to achieve its goals. IT context management is a dynamic IT process that uses data in one application to point to data resident in a separate application.

There are many examples of EAFs, such as TOGAF, Gartner Enterprise Architecture, C4ISR, CORBA, Federal Enterprise Architecture, Zachman Framework, and many more. Each one of the EAFs follows a specific format and uses a different specification.

Table 10.2 shows examples of EAFs and their specifications.

4 www.opengroup.org/TOGAF