Using EA Principles in Enterprise Technical Architecture

Reference

Gartner: Toolkit Best Practice: Using EA Principles in Enterprise Technical Architecture

Enterprise technical architects — that is, technical architects, infrastructure planners, project architects and solution designers — often want to get straight to product comparison and selection. However, better enterprise technology viewpoints, ETA modeling and design work should reflect careful integration with overall business goals, as well as adherence to particular IT drivers and specific technology guidelines and best practices. EA principles are part of the guidelines to leverage — and leverage explicitly. Principles present expected behaviors that if adhered to will enable strategies to become realities.

We Enterprise Architects specify enterprise architecture principles based on organizational vision and strategies. Principles and Standards provide a firm foundation for making architecture and planning decisions, framing architecture and supporting resolution of contradictory situations. Architecture principles guide our architecture work, our decision making and choice of selection. As Gartner indicates “Choosing which principles are appropriate for a given organization at a lower level — for example, for standard ETA models such as technical patterns and technical services, or for particular individual infrastructure designs and implementations — should reflect the general goals of the organization at a high level.”

One of the big challenges for success architecture work is to incorporate a principled approach to designing technology and infrastructure. Each enterprise architecture team has a set of enterprise architecture principles but they are not always applied or used by architects during their architecture definition process. For principles to work a governance framework must be defined: the definition of a principle should specify the decision that has to be made, the choices (eventually), the body (role) that makes the decision and the typical use case (when to use it).

Finally, principles enable continuous improvement of the processes and artifacts. The more organizations know about the principles that guide their decision making — and the more specifically they document these principles in general (and in standard models), and then in per project designs document specifically how the principles are followed or broken — the better their models and designs will be.

Using EA principles in enterprise technology architecture reflects the maturity level of organization’s enterprise architecture. Less mature enterprise architecture often conducts architecture work without fully incorporated a principled approach, ended up with more project centric rather than architecture centric work. Understanding the importance of using EA principles in defining architecture is a critical factor for successful EA.