Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a strategic framework that links an organization’s business strategy, processes, information, and technologies to achieve its goals. It encompasses multiple disciplines such as business, information, and technology architecture. It provides a holistic view of the organization that enables informed decisions, optimizes resources, and supports flexible adaptation to changes in the business environment. The focus is on designing the structure and functioning of the organization to efficiently achieve current and future goals.
Shape Your Digital Future with the Enterprise Architecture Framework
Vision
Transformation begins with vision. This phase lays the foundation for the entire project. In just a few steps, you define your project goals and identify all relevant stakeholders. Connecting and visualizing in the Goal Diagram brings structure and transparency to your process.
Hierarchical queries allow you to keep track of your goals and sub-goals and understand the strategic decisions and requirements derived from your vision.
Strategy
Translate your goals into a clear strategy. Derive specific requirements from your goals. These specific problems or challenges describe what you need to overcome to achieve the overall goal.
Formulate the business case for your project by identifying costs and benefits. This will give you a solid basis for subsequent decision making.
The benefits describe the positive impact that the successful implementation of the business case will have, whether through cost savings, increased efficiency, or other measurable benefits to the organization.
Requirements Management
Requirements management is the central component of the Enterprise Architecture Framework, bridging the gap between strategy and successful implementation of architecture projects.
It systematically captures and manages all requirements that arise from goals, needs, or specific architecture components.
This central integration ensures that all relevant requirements are identified early and managed throughout the process. This foundation plays a key role in decision making in later phases of the architecture.
Risk Management
Risk management runs in parallel with requirements management and helps you identify potential risks early on. This allows you to plan and implement countermeasures and prioritize requirements accordingly. You can create an architecture that is resilient to unexpected challenges.
Mapping risks directly to requirements allows architecture decisions to be based on an informed analysis of potential risks, resulting in more stable and sustainable outcomes.
Architecture Vision
The architecture vision is a rough, but well-founded, representation of the final system that serves as the basis for all subsequent architecture phases. This makes the vision of the target system both structurally and visually tangible.
The project requirements are clearly seen in the context of the system components. You can delineate your system context, define rules and actors, and relate everything to each other. The visual model helps to clearly understand and communicate the target architecture.
Business Architecture
The business architecture is a holistic model of the current and future business processes that will successfully execute your strategic vision.
By linking them to requirements, goals, and system context, you can understand future business processes and ensure that they directly contribute to achieving business goals. You benefit from complete process traceability.
Information Systems Architecture
Information Systems Architecture provides a structured design of your applications and data through a series of contextual diagrams.
With application architecture, you describe the target system at the application level and define which software components are required to optimally support the business processes.
With the data architecture, you define the data in the system to ensure efficient data processing and analysis.
With our framework, you can always track how your architecture decisions were made and from which components and requirements your information architectures are derived.
Technology Architecture
Support your information architectures by mapping the technical resources. The technology architecture is a comprehensive representation of all hardware and software components, including network resources, servers, hardware components, and operating systems, giving you a complete view of your IT infrastructure.
It can be derived from your requirements or existing application architectures, allowing you to design all the necessary components directly. All technical components are aligned with the specific needs of your business.
Planning and Implementation
Stay efficient, agile, and transparent as you plan and execute your projects. After defining requirements and designing the architecture, the tool-integrated framework helps you seamlessly plan and manage all activities necessary for implementation.
A clear project plan helps you keep track of all phases, from implementation to final evaluation. Benefit from easy-to-use management of your requirements, which you can easily translate into user stories for implementation. A roadmap and dashboards provide additional visibility into the progress of your projects.
Evaluation
The final phase, Evaluation, allows you to measure the success of your implementation. The Traceability view gives you an overview from initial vision, through strategy and requirements management, to architecture design and implementation. You can also track the history of any element with just a few clicks.
Regardless of the type of evaluation, you can manage all results in objectiF RPM in a traceable and version-safe manner. In addition to transparency during the course of the project, you create a basis for decision-making that will make your projects more successful in the long term.
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objectiF RPM – The Process-Driven Tool
The template supports the process flow in the tool. Find out more about the functions of objectiF RPM in the user manual.
