Enterprise Architecture (EA) is, as the name suggests, an institution-wide approach to technical architecture.  It is however about much more than technology.  The real purpose of undertaking an EA approach is to align your ICT strategy and implementation with the overall organisation strategy.  EA is therefore very much about business goals, business needs and business processes.  EA can help your ICT services work together, evolve effectively and serve and enable achievement of the organisation’s vision.  Business Process Review is only about process, Service Oriented Approaches (SOA) are only about systems.  EA brings it all together.  In this way EA is a significant enabler of change.  Implementing EA may put IT managers in the role of change agents who need to be as concerned with business process improvement and relationship building across the organisation as with technology.  In order to be effective enterprise architects IT staff must develop an understanding of the business processes that underpin their organization and must be able to communicate in terms that business users, especially senior managers, understand and can relate to.

see also:

CETIS - How to do EA from JISC Conference 2009

CETIS topic page on architecture and modelling

Wilbert Kraan's blog

Collated CETIS blog posts around EA/modelling and architecture

Technologies in use by the CDD projects to support the modelling and development of enterprise architectures include:

• Archimate (Archi JISC funded opensource Archimate modelling tool)
• BPM (Business Process Modelling)
• BPML (Business Process Modelling Language)
• TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework)

Assets available in the design studio include:

JISC pilot projects on Enterprise Architectures

all items with the tag 'enterprise architecture'