Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Architecture-Governance-Organizational Growth
analysis
, when organizations or institutions are
dealt with.
In an analogy to the economic paradigm of
Structure- Conduct-Performance
, which is tra-
ditionally known in empirical market analysis,
the
Architecture-Governance-Enterprise Growth
analysis
was designed to describe how the enter-
prise, starting from its structure (or architecture),
and followed by how it is governed, chooses its
growth strategies. The next two sub-sections show
how this analysis is viewed inside the INMATE
tool.
(FDA)
, that reflects an integration of the business
processes, engines, data sources (data bases and
knowledge bases, for example), visualization
tools, dialog managers, infrastructure, and orga-
nizational resources.
To present the FDA, the authors separate the
business of creating an enterprise architecture (i.e.,
the processes to defining and building models
of the enterprise and organizational resources
requirements) from the business of doing the
enterprise job (the construction and sale of goods
and services)
per se
. To the former they named the
Architecture in Design (AID)
, and the latter they
called
Architecture in Operation (AIO)
.
In order to offer to an enterprise a guide for
decision making related to the information technol-
ogy projects, the authors specified some phases.
According to them there are several elements in
the world of information technology that can build
an enterprise architecture: networks, computers,
terminals, programs, cabling, data sources, tasks,
and so on. To gather these elements into domains,
specific architectures of domains can be built to
represent a common composite, and that could
be focused in a simple and clear fashion. The
authors´ four domains are: Processes Domain,
Information/Knowledge Domain, Infrastructure
Domain, and Organizational Domain (a detailed
account of these domains can be found in Iver
and Gottieb, 2004).
The
Architecture Advisory Group
(US Depart-
ment of Commerce, 2004) suggests a process into
seven steps to define an information technology
architecture: 1. Define a Vision, Objectives and
Principles (Who and what their architecture ef-
forts will cover? What general principles the IT
will guide its efforts?); 2. Characterize the state
of the arts (How your office does its business,
what IT is used, and how it is used?); 3. Establish
a target architecture (What you wish that your IT
architecture should be in the future?); 4. Deter-
mine the lags between the current and the target
architecture; 5. Develop a migration plan (How
would you overcome the gap between the current
the enterprise Architecture concept
As long as the enterprise (organization or institu-
tion) structures itself and grows in
size
and com-
plexity, several factors start to inhibit its ability
in solving the problem it faces. In other words,
at one point in the evolution of the enterprise the
factors that contributed to its structuring and busi-
ness performance become numerous and complex.
When one works with such complex systems,
designers who face this complexity start to sub-
divide it into sub-systems or domains which could
be less complex than the original ones.
In the case of information systems the abstrac-
tion used to deal with this complexity is named
Architecture
. An
Architecture
(in analogy to the
building sector) is a project system that specifies
how all the components will operate to offer the
general functionality of the system. The decom-
position of the enterprise into manageable parts,
the definition of those parts, and the orchestration
of the interaction of those parts is what is called
Enterprise Architecture
.
Professionals of information technology field,
such as Iver and Gottieb (2004), focus their at-
tention to the set of components that allows the
flexible re-tooling and the creation of support
environments fro different business environments.
Hence, these authors developed an enterprise
architecture, called
Four Domain Architecture
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