A Potential Solution
A few months ago, Ms. Johnson attended a symposium for CEOs and other senior executives and learned about enterprise architecture and how it can enable business-IT alignment and agility. Upon her return, she floated the idea with the board of directors, her direct reports and vetted the idea with IT Operations head Mr. Sculley. With strong support from the board and Mr. Sculley, Ms. Johnson created an enterprise architect position reporting directly to her with dotted line reporting to all area heads.
You have been handpicked to serve as the new Chief Enterprise Architect for Largo Corporation. Your assignment is to craft an enterprise architecture vision and explain how the vision enables business goals. Among other things, you need to justify the implementation of an enterprise architecture at Largo Corporation.
According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “an enterprise architecture (EA) is an integral part of the IT investment management process. An EA provides a clear and comprehensive picture of the structure of an entity. This picture consists of snapshots of its current and proposed technical environments, and a roadmap for transitioning from the current to the target environment. When properly managed, an EA can help optimize the relationships among an organization's business operations and the IT infrastructure and applications supporting them.”
You will learn about the EA concept, various EA frameworks and apply one to the Largo Corporation. You will learn how to migrate the corporation to a well-defined enterprise architecture vision. As part of the migration effort you will need to identify the governance structure for the architecture.
As an enterprise architect, your ability to understand and apply enterprise architecture principles and methodology enables the organization to achieve a business-IT aligned, agile and scalable IT asset. This in turn enables the organization to leverage IT as a competitive strategy to respond quickly to changing market conditions in a global economy. Additionally, you must be able to communicate effectively (oral and written) to executive level management in a non-jargon, executive level manner. This learning demonstration is designed to strengthen these essential knowledge, skills, and abilities needed by enterprise architects.
3. Steps to Completion
1) Understand the Enterprise Architecture Concept
You need to first understand the foundational concepts of an EA including what it is and why it is needed. Conduct research to gain an understanding of the concept and determine how it might apply to Largo Corporation.
An informative reference book is “An Introduction to Enterprise Architecture: Third Edition” by Scott A. Bernard (start at Pg. 29). HYPERLINK "https://books.google.com/books?id=OkNMFI3_L_YC&printsec=frontcover&dq=enterprise+architecture&hl=en&sa=X&ei=WttEVc7mOoWhNsSMgMgG&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAQ" \l "v=onepage&q=enterprise%20architecture&f=false" https://books.google.com/books?id=OkNMFI3_L_YC&printsec=frontcover&dq=enterprise+architecture&hl=en&sa=X&ei=WttEVc7mOoWhNsSMgMgG&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=enterprise%20architecture&f=false
The role of an enterprise architect is captured well in this article: HYPERLINK "https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb945098.aspx"https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb945098.aspx
Deliverable: Prepare an interim report for corporate executives explaining the enterprise architecture concept and discuss its applicability to Largo Corporation. Minimum 400 words and include at least 3 references. (An interim report will be consolidated to a final deliverable in a later step.)