EA 872 Week6: Building the Future-Sate Architecture

During EA initiatives, one of most important steps is building the future-state architecture. Yet, this is also a hard step to achieve and involves lots of discussions, different meetings, and distilling the different ideas and requirements into some very important artifacts that need to be built. These artifacts typically describe the desired future state of the enterprise and include requirements of the business needs, principles to reference decisions of the architecture, and models on how the components of the EA will interact to deliver the business value.

EA team has to lead the development of the conceptual principles for the business, information and technology viewpoints pertaining to the enterprise. This is not an easy task as the core EA team has to take the high level architecture principles taken from the business team discussions w.r.t to the business context of the enterprise, then  engage in detail the implementation team (solutions),  technology team , and the EA governance team to derive suitable matrices that can be referenced to guide the decisions made  during the architecture implementation.  An output example would be mapping business architecture principles such as compliance to an information principle such as access to data, or mapping updates and modifications to data to the auditing capability.  Additionally, the same compliance example would be mapped to technology principles such as master data management of all data (ex. an MDD system applied to the data repository).

Conceptual process pattern is another artifact of the business viewpoint of the enterprise architecture that needs to be delivered. This is a diagram depicting the detailed level business process patterns that are necessary to support the enterprise business strategy. This diagram can be derived following discussions with the executive team, VPs, and architecture team  (information and business).

A process topology diagram is an artifact that shows how all critical processes of the enterprise follow the business functions and relate to the business anchor model chosen by the enterprise. It might take time and cycles of drafting and modifications, but the process topology diagram will provide a visual depiction of the strategic intent of the enterprise and business change requirements that helps as a reference and simply from a visual point to drive clarity on direction. 

An important element of what runs in each enterprise artery system is information. This is why an information flow diagram showing how information is consumed including the different attributes of the business is another important EA artifact. These diagrams can get tricky if there are too much flow-arrows on the diagrams and it might be helpful to track the details in separate flow diagrams for each unit while keeping the master information flow diagram at a higher level.

Another artifact is the application layer diagram that shows how all the enterprise different units can be consolidated including the future strategic view. This can also be supplemented by additional vertical hierarchy diagrams showing the applications domains and infrastructure domains and horizontal domains within each such as the application tools, application server, integration, database, storage etc… 

In summary, building the future-state architecture is probably one of the most consuming efforts as viewpoints need to be solidified and the enterprise requirements and capabilities need to be mapped out from the existing current state. It is recommended not to spend too much time documenting the current state and rather spend the time focusing on building the future-state architecture by delivering artifacts such as the above mentioned ones.



References: 

"L04: Future-State Architecture: Implementation Level". Retrieved from Penn State EA-872 class material.

"Enterprise Architecture Program Pitfalls: Don't Start With the Current State". Brian Burke, Bard Papegaaij, Dave Guevara. (Gartner, Jan 2011)