Design II Enterprise Architecture Flashcards
What is an Enterprise Architecture?
An enterprise architecture defines the basic building blocks of an organization’s information technology and systems - the applications, the data and the infrastructure and specifies the connections between them.
Briefly describe the typical enterprises IT environments
- a mix of stand alone and connected systems
- kept in use as long as possible
- slow to implement
- expensive to deploy and maintain
- unreliable
What are the legacy systems?
Older IT systems in large enterprises are known as legacy systems
What is an enterprise architecture used for?
- ensure technology investment is aligned with business goals
- ensure that technology environment is integrated, secure, robust, flexible
- help prioritize IT initiatives
AVG life of IT infrastructure vs AVG life of a business strategy
5 ~ 7 years – < 12 months
What are the viewpoints of an enterprise architecture?
EA defines the building blocks of an organization’s IT to ensure it is reliable, flexible and affordable:
- Corporate view
- Long View
- End to end
- Standards-based
What are the benefits of an enterprise architecture?
- reduced cost of standard components
- faster increased flexibility and time to market
- More robust, better availability, security and performance
- Joined up, connected systems sharing functions and data
Developing EA. Describe the developing guiding principles
- Business-focused: Align the architecture with business needs; make-it comprehensible.
- Independent: Make the architecture independent of the organizational structure.
- Standards-based: Use industry-based, web-enabled standard components.
- State of the market: Use solutions that are proven rather than leading-edge.
What are the critical issues and constraints for companies?
- Very high-profile nationwide brand delivering time-critical, sensitive services.
- Call centre compromised, old and failing.
- Government and regulatory scrutiny following repeated security failures.
- Long-term degradation of public funding.
- Poor to non-existent IT capabilities senior management.
- Business environment rapidly moving online and from fixed to mobile channels.
What are the technology limitations - systems and networks?
- IT is costly, few common components/ standards in places.
- IT in unreliable because it is made up of different systems with lots of customized elements.
- IT is inflexible and slow, as they are complex and expensive to change (slow).
- IT provides poor connectivity with external parties.
- IT is old, some systems don’t support the current needs of the business
What are the technology limitations - data and information?
- Data quality is poor as is distributed throughout the organization aka paper based - data integrity.
- Data is replicated as each system has its own version of the truth.
- Sensitive data is insecure, multiple systems and multiple data sources.
- Limited sharing of information within the same organization.
What are the technology limitations - process and organization?
- IT is unstructured, few processes in place to govern the prioritization.
- Reactive, IS department generally responds to individual departmental request.
- IT is under-resourced usually more wot to do than people do it.
- IT capability is limited, skills in IS department don’t match the skills required.
- IT procurement has few guidelines as management of IT suppliers is not based on formalized contracts.
What are the enterprise architecture layers and descriptions? or stages to develop a EA framework
- Public facing: Functions that are visible outside the organization.
- Departmental functions: business functions that atypically are used by a single department.
- Group functions: that are replicated across departments.
- Technical infrastructure: the hardware, system and networks needed to run business applications.
What are the migration constraints?
- Defining the architecture involves developing a road map to guide the business to the target environment.
- Identify the stages at which core technology components should be in place.
- Migrations scenarios can be developed to provide a basis for planning the short and medium term investments.
What are the migration principles?
- Evolutionary approach, replacement of technology is gradual.
- Business-driven prioritization, scale and timing of IT investment is determined by business.
- Shared components introduced, business initiatives should identify where shared components can be introduced.
- Migrations towards standard environments.
