Business Process Integration

Document: Adeptia Enterprise Architecture Framework. (27 slides, 15 mins to review).

Over the years, as we sell and deploy our software for our customers, we are amazed to see how many companies do not have an Enterprise Architecture approach in place for their IT infrastructure. This is not just limited to smaller companies for whom an IT Enterprise Architecture (EA) may be an overkill but even many mid-sized to large businesses have not yet invested in putting an overarching enterprise architecture in place.

There are many reasons for not having this architecture in place but some of the main reasons we have observed are:

• Growth of business from when EA was not needed to now when it is
• Focus on day-to-day problem solving and short-term IT issues
• Focus on “must-have” needs rather than “nice-to-have” initiatives which is how EA is perceived
• Lack of skills in-house to drive, implement and manage EA

Although having an Enterprise Architecture in place is certainly not needed to successfully deploy Adeptia solutions, we recommend our customers to think about having fundamental practices of EA in place to get the maximum advantage from their investment in Adeptia. A well-executed Enterprise Architecture really gets the most value out of a process-centric and SOA-based software solution such as Adeptia. 

Some of the benefits of Enterprise Architecture are:

• Aligns business strategy with technology investment
• Creates a vision and strategy for Information Technology
• “Blueprint” on how to view and approach IT projects
• Presents a Functional and a matching Technology view for every initiative
• Helps put a plan in place on how to get to the vision in an evolutionary, incremental way
• Provides a structure for consistent IT decision making

An Enterprise Architecture for each company would be unique as it will take into account its business model, strategic objectives, size of the business and IT applications and systems. Adeptia helps its customers by providing a “framework” to help them think about a model for how to design an EA that best meets their needs. Here is a document that describes the Adeptia Enterprise Architecture Framework. (27 slides, 15 mins to review). Please keep in mind this is only a “framework”, which is a roadmap or a starting point, and not a full-blown Enterprise Architecture.

This document recommends having two perspectives to an IT Enterprise Architecture: A Functional View and a Technology View. An EA would have the following four key elements:

• People
• Processes
• Systems
• Information

Each of these elements have a number of other attributes as defined in the document.

We have found that this framework provides an excellent starting point to companies that have not thought about Enterprise Architecture or need a high-level introduction to taking a consistent approach towards all their IT projects and initiatives.