Enterprise Architecture
General material on architecture at portfolio and estate scale.
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An enterprise architecture function has produced extensive documentation over three years and business leaders question its value. What is the function doing wrong?
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You inherit an estate of roughly 400 applications, no reliable inventory, and a mandate to reduce cost and risk. What do you do in the first ninety days?
2 min answer
7 terms in this topic
Application Portfolio Management
Maintaining an inventory of every application with its owner, cost, business value and technical health, and using it to decide what to invest in, re…
practiceArchitecture Review Board
A forum that reviews significant designs against standards, risks and strategy before commitment.
case-studyCapital One's Data Centre Exit
A major US bank closed all eight of its data centres and moved fully to public cloud, treating governance automation as the enabling technology rathe…
practiceEnterprise Architecture
The practice of owning the architectural decisions whose costs and benefits land on different teams or outside any team's planning horizon - the deci…
practicePaved Road
A supported, opinionated default way to build and run a service, made easy enough that teams choose it rather than being required to.
practiceReference Architecture
A pre-approved, documented template for a recurring class of solution, so that similar problems do not get individually redesigned.
practiceTOGAF
An enterprise architecture framework whose central element is the ADM, an iterative cycle from vision through business, data, application and technol…
Neighbouring topics
EA Domains
Business, application, data and technology architecture as viewpoints.
Application Architecture
The application estate as a designed portfolio rather than an accumulation.
Technology Architecture
Platforms, runtimes and infrastructure standards across the estate.
Capability Maps in EA
The stable frame for hanging investment, ownership and health off.
Application Portfolio Management
Inventory, ownership, cost and health for every application.
Application Rationalisation
Retire, consolidate, replatform — and why retirement is under-applied.
Technology Standards
Guidance that teams follow because it helps, not because it is mandated.
Technology Radar
Adopt, trial, assess and hold — with movement, dates and owners.
Reference Architectures
Pre-approved templates for recurring solution shapes.
Architecture Governance
Preventive, automated controls rather than review meetings.
Architecture Review Boards
Thresholds, early engagement and a real route to accept deviation.
Enterprise Integration
Estate-wide integration strategy, standards and shared infrastructure.
TOGAF
The ADM as a checklist, tailored rather than followed literally.
EA Frameworks
Zachman, FEAF and others — vocabulary rather than method.
Architecture Roadmaps
Sequencing change across an estate with dependencies and funding.
Paved Roads
Making the supported path the easiest path, with a way to leave it.
Platform Teams
Reducing other teams' cognitive load, measured by adoption.
InnerSource
Open-source collaboration practices applied inside an organisation.
EA Metrics
Measuring whether architecture work changed anything.