Wednesday, November 29, 2006

A Definition of Enterprise Architecture

Today, I was asked, "What is enterprise architecture?" There should be a simple answer for such a simple question.

The first question that popped into my mind was, “From which point of view?” Of course, the answer to that is from the point of view of someone who knows nothing about architectural views! Some of the definitions I have read seem to blend the role of enterprise architecture with a definition of it.

In the spirit of agility, I propose a single sentence definition:

Enterprise architecture is a set of models describing the technical implementation of business strategy and processes.

2 comments:

James McGovern said...

Ask yourself is there is a distinct between strategies, roadmaps and blueprints and see how it changes your definition...

wpbarr said...

It seems to me that roadmaps and blueprints are just additional artifacts of realizing a strategy. The roadmap could be one scale of measure.