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Enterprise Architecture Solutions

Align IT and the business to accelerate and drive successful transformations

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Enterprise architecture (EA) provides business and IT alignment by mapping applications, technologies and data to the value streams and business functions they support. It defines business capabilities and interdependencies as they relate to enterprise strategy, bridging the gap between ideation and implementation. An effective enterprise architecture framework provides a blueprint for business and operating models, identifies risks and opportunities, and enables the creation of technology roadmaps. Simply put, EA enables IT and business transformation by helping technology and business innovation leaders focus on achieving successful, value-driven outcomes.

What Is Enterprise Architecture?

Enterprise architecture defines and documents the structure and operation of an organization with the purpose of determining how it can achieve its objectives most effectively. Through analysis, planning, design and implementation, it translates enterprise goals into IT capabilities. The advantages of an EA practice are improved decision-making, the ability to adapt to changing market conditions, eliminating inefficient or redundant processes, and optimizing people, processes and technology.

Importance of Enterprise Architecture & Common Use Cases

Organizations are living organisms, so they have to learn, adapt and evolve to succeed. The modern enterprise is also complex: decisions involve multiple technical and business stakeholders who don’t always use the same terminology, and thousands of employees across the globe must learn new technologies and processes on a regular basis to perform their day-to-day duties. It can take a lot of time and resources to research, collect, understand and share relevant information internally as well as externally. Enterprise architecture helps document and manage this complexity, turning all this data into meaningful insights. The most common EA programs or use cases are:

Digital Transformation
Embrace new technology to drive more value, such as developing new products and services and providing better customer experiences.

Application Portfolio Management
Inventory enterprise applications to identify redundancies and develop plans for rationalization and/or modernization.

Regulatory Compliance
Identify sensitive information associated with value streams, prepare for and respond to third-party audits, and ensure accountability and transparency in compliance processes.

Big Data Adoption
Understand where Big Data fits into operations and processes and prioritize these initiatives with governance over data sources and analytics.

Data Center Consolidation
Identify hardware and software packages to simplify migration and reduce the associated risks in line with required business outcomes.

Cloud Migration
Determine which applications to migrate to the cloud, including assessing the associated risks and operational impacts, as well as lift-and-shift strategies when moving from one provider to another.

Data Governance
Understand the relationship between data assets and applications to appropriately direct data flows and usage, including policies and procedures.

Data Security & Risk Management
Be proactive in improving security, business policies and procedures, and allocating the correct resources especially to support new implementations.

Mergers & Acquisitions
Rationalize redundant resources, capabilities and applications and enable better communication and decision-making to determine which systems to cut or phase out.

Knowledge Improvement & Retention
Take a structured approach to new-hire onboarding as well as ongoing employee training for an educated and effective workforce.

Innovation Management
From ideation to implementation, manage the funnel of ideas and the development of systems and processes to create new value.

Artificial Intelligence
Understand data, applications, lineage, impact and source history to determine how they connect to the rest of the business and the IT ecosystem.

Benefits of an Enterprise Architecture Framework

In addition to its traditional role of IT governance, EA has become increasingly relevant to the wider business due to rapid digital transformation and game-changing emerging technologies. In fact, Gartner says EA is becoming a “form of internal management consulting” because it provides relevant, timely insights management needs to make decisions.

While basic visualization tools and spreadsheets have been used, these are limited and generic solutions that hinder the collaboration required to methodically and continuously measure and maintain models, frameworks and concepts as they evolve. That’s why enterprise architecture management is more strategic and impactful when powered by technology to centrally document and visualize EA artifacts for better decision-making.

Alignment & Central Source of Truth

Provide a central source of truth about the enterprise and how it operates using a shared, central repository with integrated views of strategy, capabilities, applications, data assets, etc., described in a common vocabulary.

Reduced Risks & Costs

Lower both the risks and costs of IT infrastructure, digital transformation and innovation management endeavors with EA insights.

Understanding & Managing Complexity

Capture, understand and articulate opportunities, challenges, trends and risks so business and IT leaders can address and better manage complexity.

Effective Change Management

Explore EA model elements, links and dependencies to manage change with quick and easy impact analysis through heatmaps, reports, charts and graphs.

Design Thinking

Anticipate issues and change, build prototypes and test how the organization should work based on a design mentality driven by tooling.

New or More Lucrative Value Streams

Identify opportunities to develop new or rearchitect existing value streams to make them more profitable.

Enterprise Collaboration

Enable a wider range of non-technical users to participate in the design of business and operating models for successful business outcomes by democratizing EA.

Business & IT Interoperability

Break down organizational silos and harmonize data across operational processes, applications and models with integrations to enterprise applications and third-party tools.

Greater Operational Efficiency

Balance and prioritize current operational demands, disruptions and opportunities against the long-term strategic vision and make improvements.

Why erwin for Enterprise Architecture Management?

To do enterprise architecture the right way, you need the right tools for communication and collaboration with the business. erwin Evolve provides full-featured enterprise architecture software based on technology that’s proven its reliability and effectiveness for more than 20 years.

Our EA product managers, developers and consultants have deep domain expertise because they’ve worked with some of the largest, most complex and heavily regulated enterprises across the world. We partner with our active user community to address their needs, making enhancements as well as adding new features and functionality.

erwin Evolve provides these core capabilities to help EA programs succeed:

Flexible Configuration
On-premise or cloud-hosted with a customizable metamodel and adjustable user interface with user-defined views

Enterprise Models
Creation and visualization of complex models for strategy, processes, applications, technologies and data

Central Repository
Captures all relevant EA data, supporting thousands of users in central or decentralized environments with access from anywhere and automatic mass updates

Collaborative Web Platform
User friendly and business-centric to capture and edit data with surveys and other social features to promote communication between IT and business users

Reporting
Diagrams, dashboards, workflows and “what-if” analysis

Professional Services
Expertise to help maximize ROI, as well as provide custom development and integrations to meet specific requirements

erwin Evolve also includes business process modeling functionality. And it is part of the larger erwin EDGE platform that integrates data modeling, data catalog and data literacy capabilities.

Use enterprise architecture software to adapt and thrive by analyzing, designing, planning and implementing IT capabilities that take care of business.

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Resources

eBook

Enterprise Architecture & Innovation Management

PDF

White Paper

The Evolution of Enterpise Architecture Management

PDF

Analyst Report

Ovum Market Radar: Enterprise Architecture

PDF

eBook

Application Portfolio Management for M&A

PDF

White Paper

Enterprise Architecture & Data Modeling

PDF