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Oxford Architectural Design & Consulting
 
 
Modeling Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a means to support the business through the use of IT. EA modeling is a holistic approach to capturing not just all of the areas within IT but also the alignment of IT to the business. The purpose of EA is to ensure that IT provides tangible benefit to and keeps pace with the business. EA provides information necessary to help make tactical and strategic business decisions. To do this, it must address the needs of all stakeholders.
In order to address the concerns of each stakeholder, we must take a divide and conquer approach. There are several architectural standards today that prescribe various aspects of capturing Enterprise Architecture. Standards like the Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), the International Standards Organization’s Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) and the Rational Unified Process (RUP) prescribe a process for capturing your architecture. Each also provides a set of architectural views, but leaves it up to the architectural implementation team to fully determine what they should be.
Another standard, Model Driven Architecture (MDA) by the Object Management Group (OMG), also provides a separation of concerns, in this case into three levels; the Computational Independent Model that describes the business environment in completely technology free terms, the Platform Independent Model (PIM) that provides a design solution that is not tied to a particular technology base, and a Platform Specific Model (PSM) that puts the solution in terms of the chosen technology base.
 
  Excerpt from TOGAF – The Book, Section 2.4 Using TOGAF with Other Frameworks:
Because TOGAF is a generic framework, as mentioned above, and intended to be used in a wide variety of environments, it does not prescribe a specific set of deliverables; rather it talks in general terms about the types of deliverable that need to be produced, and focuses instead on the methods by which these should be developed.
 
After extensive work with numerous large companies in the insurance, financial, pharmaceutical, publishing, and automobile distributorship sectors in adopting the concepts of the above standards, I have found that the following architectural views provide a good representation of the needs of the various stakeholders and a good starting point for my clients. These views are for companies that have business information systems with multiple business domains in a distributed environment. A company with other development modes, e.g., real-time applications, will have a much different structure to their architecture. Click on the packages below to read more about each view.