The Architecture Management process exists to create, maintain, promote and govern the use of IT architecture models and standards, across and within business change programs. IT Architecture thus helps the stakeholder community coordinate and control their IT related activities, in pursuit of common business goals.

Outcomes

As a result of successful implementation of this process:   

• From the boardroom to the desktop, all elements of business and IT solutions receive governance and guidance that has enhanced flexibility, consistency, integration, and reuse
• All information systems and information technology infrastructure exhibit improved manageability characteristics
• The exploitation of IT across the enterprise is effective and efficient

Scope

An effective enterprise architecture (EA) should encompass:

• An architecture
  • This is the way our projects should be engineered.
• • An EA provides a specification of the business and IT architecture models that must be adopted by change programs and projects. This includes the overall business, application, data, services, infrastructure architectures, and together with the principles and guidelines needed to ensure these models are exploited properly.
• Governance
  • An EA must be flexible and evolve constantly if it is to support the business changes needed by an organization wanting to innovate and transform itself. Architectural governance has two aspects: ensuring that the architecture's specifications are adhered to (or formal exceptions granted), and ensuring that the architecture evolves in step with business demands.
• Transition Planning
  • These are the projects we should do and this is their scope.
• • An EA needs a collection of processes and tasks designed to support the selection and scoping of the right projects aimed at realizing the EA vision. The processes should be in concert with the business-as-usual business and IT project prioritization planning processes.

Includes

• Business architecture (BA)
• • The relationships and interactions between the various business units, at appropriate levels of decomposition
• Information Systems (IS) Architecture
  • The business-dependent aspects of IT; the automated parts of BA
• Information Technology (IT) Architecture
• • The business-independent aspect of IT; the underlying IT infrastructure

The architecture must consistently support several viewpoints across these three areas:

The applications viewpoint – ensuring functionality can track through the layers. For example, enabling an architect to link business activities and processes to applications and transaction management services

The data viewpoint – ensuring an architect approach to information. For example, linking business entities to data definitions and into database technologies

User viewpoint – facilitating the identification and support of an enterprise's user groups (whether internal or external, private or corporate), including the definition of how they are to be supported at the IS (user interface) and IT (interface technology) level

The architecture must be:

• Maintained – An enterprise needs to keep its architecture fresh and vital, reacting to changes in the businesses strategy as well as changes in technology through a vitality process. In all probability, this will include the identification of new or changes to existing standards through a selection process
• Used and controlled – It is necessary to actively ensure that solution projects conform to the constraints of the architecture (while still assuring their ability to meet the project's business requirements) through a conformance process. Inevitably, there will be occasions when there is a conflict between the project's needs and the architecture, requiring an exception process
• Communicated – To be effective, the architecture must be understood by those who are required to use it, through the use of a communication process

Excludes

• Portfolio Management, in which specific change programs are identified, prioritized, and managed to completion
• Requirements specification, in which specific business requirements are identified and translated into specifications (Solution Requirements)
• Solution design, in which specific IT systems are designed to meet particular business or IT operational needs
• Solution delivery and operation, including the procurement, commissioning and operation of IT components and systems
• Enterprise systems management, responsible for planning and execution of day-to-day management of the installed IT infrastructure