Business Use Case Driven Enterprise Architecture

As mentioned in the class “If the scope of the Enterprise Architecture practice is limited to primarily the domain of the IT organization then Business Architecture may be a separate group that would be a contributor to the EA process and not fall completely under the domain of the Enterprise Architecture practice. The nature and structure of Business Architecture varies greatly from organization to organization today.” (EA 874, Dr. Fusco)

Whether or not Business Architecture is under the domain of Enterprise Architecture, enterprise architecture practice of organization always starts with business case or business scenario. The purpose of Enterprise Architecture is to provide business capabilities with agility and efficiency by simplify and optimize organization’s IT landscape, to consolidate IT system to improve user satisfaction, to bring in new technology to help organization’s innovation. Even though Business Architecture is not within Enterprise Architecture organization, all of enterprise architecture activities trigged by business requirements or business case.

Predictive Maintenance using Hadoop for the Oil and Gas industry is an example of such.

Oil and gas companies have a major opportunity to increase efficiency and reduce operational costs through better asset tracking and predictive maintenance. While failing oil prices, oil and gas companies are facing increasing pressure to reduce operating costs and manage the business more effectively and efficiently.

Physical inspection of equipment in remote locations is typically an expensive process. This lack of visibility can lead to equipment failure and costly unscheduled maintenance and non-productive time (NPT). Predictive maintenance allows company to collect data from sensors. The data will be huge which requires big data solution. Enterprise architecture team will create an architecture which includes data, application and technology. Hadoop can be application and technology solution to address this big data challenge. The solution can provide capabilities to store and process real-time sensor data, Ingest and analyze real-time sensor and historical data alongside maintenance data generated from industrial equipment of production, and then predictively learns patterns of normal and errant behaviors to provide warning.

Within our organization, we do not have formal business architecture organization but EA works closely with BRM and LOB managers to get business requirements and identify business use cases, then EA is to create solution space to meet the business requirement and challenges.