An Approach to Building Effective Enterprise Architectures

Cost and time are significant practical concerns when an organization addresses the development of an Enterprise Architecture (EA). In order to overcome these challenges, organizations need to focus on those architecture deliverables that are most relevant to the business problem being addressed with EA, yet without loosing cohesive integration over a longer life-cycle. In this paper, we propose a new approach to develop an Enterprise Architecture. Our technique aims at guiding the creation of a simplified EA with well-integrated business and IT architectures. Furthermore, it re-uses related artifacts that may have been created by different stakeholders in the company over time. Our approach can be used to enhance common Enterprise Architecture standards. In fact, we illustrate how the approach may be used in connection to The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) method for EA. A key aspect of our proposed technique lies on five key relationship types applied to integrate the different architectural dimensions of EA.