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Press Releases

12/8/2011 - Alfabet makes million dollar donation to EA Center

12/8/2011 - Cameron is invited speaker at World CIO Forum

11/30/2011 - Wirpo conference charts the future of EA Center at Penn State

9/28/2011 - Federation of Enterprise Architecture Professional Organizations (FEAPO) signs charter

7/29/2011 - Pinnacle Business Group donates $3.2 million to Penn State Center for Enterprise Architecture

6/1/2011 - Armstrong Process Group donates 9 Million to the Center for Enterprise Architecture

5/6/2011 - Dr. Cameron was recently awarded the Career Achievement Award from The Network Professional Association

4/15/2011 - Architecture & Governance Magazine publishes article on the Center for Enterprise Architecture

02/14/2011 - Enterprise Architecture professional organizations launch FEAPO

1/19/2011 - Center for Enterprise Architecture Launched!

09/27/2010 - Enterprise Architecture Group 2nd Annual Meeting

10/7-9/2009 - Gartner publishes article on Enterprise Architecture Initiative

09/28/2009 - EA Advisory Group September Kick-off Meeting was a great success!

Industry Association Partners

The Business Architects Association

The Object Management Group

The IST Enterprise Architecture Perspective

The scope of enterprise architecture for our initiatives is the architecture of the enterprise as a whole, which is broader than the traditional use of EA to mean an enterprise-wide architecture for the enterprise's information technology (IT) assets. The latter architecture is sometimes referred to as an enterprise information technology architecture (EITA) or an enterprise information systems architecture (EISA). There are several enterprise frameworks and methodologies that have been developed for the EITA (or EISA) and are targeted at the alignment of IT assets and capabilities with the enterprise's mission and strategy. There is growing interest in the application of this architectural thinking to enterprise domains other than IT. We strongly support the evolution and extension of frameworks and methodologies that originated in the IT domain to the rest of the enterprise. We will use the term "enterprise architecture" in our discussions, and when referring to the popular frameworks and methodologies, with an understanding that the past and current use of the term typically refers to EITA (or EISA) but that the term will evolve to include the entire enterprise in the future (and already has in many circles).

Normally, an enterprise architecture takes the form of a comprehensive set of integrated models that describe the structure and the functions of an enterprise. Important uses of it are in systematic IT planning and architecting, and in enhanced decision making. The individual models in an EA are arranged in a logical manner, and this provides an ever-increasing level of detail about the enterprise, including:

Its objectives and goals
Its processes and organization
Its systems and data
The technology used

Industry research organizations such as Gartner, Forrester, and others, as well as the scant academic research, often stress that the definition of enterprise architecture should be action-oriented, that is, focus on the "verb" and we concur with this perspective, because we feel it is important to emphasize the fact that enterprise architecture is a process. This is important because we find that often, when people focus on the outputs ("the noun") rather than the process, they tend to be more concerned about producing a predefined set of deliverables than they are about meeting the strategic imperatives of the enterprise. This single-minded focus on deliverables is a mistake because it can lead to mountains of "artifacts" (requirements, models, principles, guidelines, standards) that are not necessarily connected to the strategic imperatives of the enterprise and are therefore not leveraged across the organization. This process enables the IT architecture to evolve and enable the enterprise to continuously transform how it performs its business.

The usefulness of this perspective is underscored by how it can bridge from theoretical academic research outcomes towards tangible and pragmatic outcomes such as requirements, principles and models that describe the next major transformational future state, an analysis of the gaps between the future state and the current state, and road maps that support the evolution of the enterprise to the future state by closing the gaps.

An EA process that delivers business value to the enterprise produces several things:

An articulation of the strategic requirements of the enterprise
Models of the future state, which illustrate what the enterprise should look like across all EA viewpoints in support of the business strategy
A road map of the change initiatives required to reach that future state
The requirements, principles, standards and guidelines that will steer the implementation of change initiatives

The primary purpose of describing the architecture of an enterprise is to improve the effectiveness or efficiency of the business itself. This includes innovations in the structure of an organization, the centralization or federation of business processes, the quality and timeliness of business information, or ensuring that money spent on information technology can be justified.

There are many different ways to use this information to improve the functioning of a business. One method, described in the popular TOGAF architectural framework, is to develop an Architectural Vision, which is a description of the business that represents a "target" or "future state" goal. Once this vision is well understood, a set of intermediate steps is created that illustrate the process of changing from the present situation to the target. These intermediate steps are called "Transitional Architectures" by TOGAF. Similar methods have been described in other Enterprise Architecture frameworks (see "A Comparison of the Top Four Enterprise-Architecture Methodologies" at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb466232.aspx).

We do not intend to endorse a particular framework or methodology but rather explore how these approaches are used in practice and provide objective research in a variety of EA-related areas.

Enterprise Architecture Areas of Practice

Many enterprise architecture frameworks break down the practice of developing and using EA artifacts into four practice areas. This allows the enterprise to be described from four important viewpoints. By taking this approach, enterprise architects can assure their business stakeholders that they have provided sufficient information for effective decision making.

These practice areas are:

Business:
1. Strategy maps, goals, corporate policies, Operating Model
2. Functional decompositions (e.g. IDEF0, SADT), capabilities and organizational models
3. Business processes
4. Organization cycles, periods and timing
5. Suppliers of hardware, software, and services
Applications:
1. Application software inventories and diagrams
2. Interfaces between applications - that is: events, messages and data flows
3. Intranet, Extranet, Internet, eCommerce, EDI links with parties within and outside of the organization
Information:
1. Metadata - data that describes your enterprise data elements
2. Data models: conceptual, logical, and physical
Technology:
1. Hardware, platforms, and hosting: servers, and where they are kept
2. Local and wide area networks, Internet connectivity diagrams
3. Operating System
4. Infrastructure software: Application servers, DBMS
5. Programming Languages, etc.

While these four areas are the traditional breakdowns for analysis, they imply that business understanding is approximately one quarter of the process or one quarter of the importance. These four practice areas are useful for conducting enterprise analysis but EA needs to be treated as a business issue, not a technology issue. The primary purpose of describing the architecture of an enterprise is to improve the effectiveness or efficiency of the business itself. This includes innovations in the structure of an organization, the centralization or federation of business processes, the quality and timeliness of business information, or ensuring that money spent on information technology (IT) can be justified.

To reflect this perspective, the College of IST is partnering with the College of Business and plans to give the business side of the equation equal prominence with the IT side of the equation.

A final, important, element of EA practice is "transformational change." Enterprises undertake the process of enterprise architecture for a variety of reasons. The enterprise wants to perform better by doing things differently, and it expects the EA program to effect that change. All the future-state models, principles and road maps will be for naught unless they are actually implemented or they are an ongoing part of how the enterprise operates. This usually requires a robust governance mechanism that will ensure that EA guidance is followed and that there is strong integration with the IT strategy, enterprise program management and portfolio management functions, in order to ensure that common strategic goals are shared.

Academic research and industry research organizations alike point to change as an important variable (and area of study) to ensure that the focus is not only on different components of a representation but also includes the essential property of helping an organization (a complex entity) evolve and move along a desired, and sometime changing, trajectory. This can take several forms and may encompass one or more of the layers above as well as interactions among these layers (leading to shearing models of change suggested by IBM, as continuing change efforts instead of traditional freeze-unfreeze models). EA facilitates these processes by explicitly stating these requirements, spelling out future states and suggesting ways to better align technology with changes in strategy.

Here's a short video on "What is Enterprise Architecture?" that we put together from interviews with some of our group members.