The Practice of Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a set of descriptions relevant to both business and IT intended to bridge the communication gap between business and IT stakeholders in organizations, facilitate information systems planning and improve business and IT alignment. Due to complex historical reasons, the notion of enterprise architecture was always surrounded by endless speculations, dangerous myths, non-existing best practices, unfulfilled promises, expensive failures and grave disappointments. Traditionally the entire discourse around enterprise architecture was dominated by shallow advice and faddish approaches, e.g. well-known EA frameworks, infinitely distant from the practical realities, but nonetheless aggressively promoted by commercially motivated consultancies and gurus. At the same time, realistic and trustworthy information on enterprise architecture is still incredibly hard to find in any available sources.

Based on an extensive study of the actual industry best practices and existing EA literature, this book provides a unique, systematic, end-to-end description of various aspects of an EA practice integrated into a consistent logical picture. In particular, this book offers clear, research-based, conceptually sound and practically actionable answers to the key questions related to enterprise architecture:

• What is the meaning of enterprise architecture and an EA practice?
• What processes constitute established EA practices and how do they work?
• What EA artifacts are used in successful EA practices and how?
• What is the best way to structure architecture roles and functions?
• What software tools and modeling languages are necessary for enterprise architecture?
• How to initiate an EA practice in organizations from scratch and evolve it?
• Where do current EA best practices originate from?

This book is organized in a highly structured, sequential manner and does not require any prior knowledge of enterprise architecture. The book is intended for a broad audience of people interested in enterprise architecture including practicing and aspiring architects, architecture managers, academic EA researchers, EA lecturers and students in universities.

• Part I: Introduction to Enterprise Architecture
1. Introduction
2. The Concept of Enterprise Architecture
3. The Role of Enterprise Architecture Practice
4. Enterprise Architecture and City Planning
5. The Dialog Between Business and IT
6. Processes of Enterprise Architecture Practice
7. IT Initiatives and Enterprise Architecture
• Part II: Enterprise Architecture Artifacts
8. The CSVLOD Model of Enterprise Architecture
9. Considerations
10. Standards
11. Visions
12. Landscapes
13. Outlines
14. Designs
15. The CVSLOD Model Revisited
• Part III: Other Aspects of Enterprise Architecture
16. Architects in Enterprise Architecture Practice
17. Architecture Functions in Organizations
18. Instruments for Enterprise Architecture
19. The Lifecycle of Enterprise Architecture Practice
• Appendix: The Origin of EA and Modern EA Best Practices

A refreshingly good overview of the EA field, that manages to discard a lot of the often jargon-filled texts that exists. And the author manages to stay fairly neutral when describing the evolution of the EA field.

if you want to understand what EA is about, including its drawbacks, this is a recommended book, with a lot of examples, that even manages to explain a lot of the concepts that you will need later, if you want to deep-dive.

Unfortunately, I agree with the author that EA is very needed but seldom used, due to the overly complexity of the field (and sadly, Powerpoint is more often used to present complex ideas to management)