The tech world is dynamic. New technology emerges rapidly that changes the human standard of living — how people work, where they can work, and smarter ways to work. This is where Enterprise Architecture becomes relevant.

It helps tech-based companies bridge the gap and balance between their IT department performance and their business development while ensuring that they keep abreast of new technologies. It also helps them navigate through the ever-advancing world of technology and find useful tools to aid their business.

Here at Tezza, we recognize the importance of Enterprise Architecture Management to businesses. In this article, you will learn what it is and why it’s important. Stay with us!

First things first. What is Enterprise Architecture?

Enterprise Architecture is the model of an enterprise’s most important components and the relationships between them.

What is Enterprise Architecture Management?

EAM is the process of creating and using Enterprise Architecture. It is also a form of management practice that uses a set of architectural guidelines and principles to facilitate the design and development of an enterprise,

Enterprise Architecture Management also helps a company to achieve its goals and visions by ensuring that its management understands IT and can control it.

With EAM, everyone can understand the relationship between the IT infrastructure, the programs installed to run it, and the information stored in these applications. Most importantly, it helps them understand how it all relates to the final user and how to use them properly in the business process.

Benefits of Enterprise Architecture Management

Apart from giving an overall understanding of the IT infrastructure, here are some of the other benefits of enterprise architecture management:

• It prepares the business for any form of disruptive change, whether external or internal. It allows the business to quickly adapt strategies, processes, and products in response to external disruptive factors like technological, political, legal, and economic changes as well as other internal factors.

• An effective enterprise architecture management also helps to detect risks in different parts of the architecture at the early stage of their manifestation. Hence, making it easier to take proper and timely measures against them.
• It also helps facilitate innovation in the enterprise. It does this by ensuring that the management is aware of existing technologies that its units can use.
• It gives a very detailed view of the kinds of projects that would immensely benefit your business strategy. It also helps businesses to recognize which projects would and wouldn’t end up being a colossal waste of time and resources. In other words, enterprise architecture management helps to build an effective project portfolio.

The Four Major Steps in Enterprise Architecture Management

1. Enterprise modeling

This is the first step in Enterprise Architecture Management. It’s also called creating a baseline. It involves creating architectural views across all the architectural domains like business, application, data, technology, etc.
These models help to detail how the enterprise’s business processes relate to the IT structures.
After these assets have been created, they are usually stored in centralized repositories where they can be easily managed, controlled, and tracked with enterprise architecture or collaboration tools like Microsoft SharePoint.

2. Leveraging Baseline

In this step, the baseline views are then published on the company’s intranet or a portal where the staff can access different parts of it that are essential and useful to their roles in the corporate setting.
For instance, the IT support department would have access to a different part of the Enterprise Architecture compared to the business users.  This would help to quickly resolve service-related issues faster and more efficiently.

3. Creating project architectures

At this point, relying on what is currently available and what is required to reach and achieve a certain goal, the enterprise architecture team is tasked with finding out what plans would work best towards delivering such visions.
Upon completion of the demand analysis, the enterprise architecture team présents the views that highlight the new components required to deliver the target architecture/goal.
These views could also serve as prototypes for the future when the enterprise is about to embark on another project delivery phase.

4. Update baseline

As the projects are being delivered, they are subject to change. Hence, the enterprise architecture team must revise the baseline to accommodate these changes. If this is not done, it would become increasingly difficult for the enterprise to embark on new change initiatives.

Final words

It is important to note though, that creating architecture systems is one thing. The real value is actualized when these systems are used to make efficient decisions.

Reach out to us here at Tezza business solutions to get you started on the journey to proper enterprise architecture management.