Profile of Our Enterprise Architecture (EA) Practice

Architecting the Enterprise for Change

Overview 

The Gavroshe brand of EA Services includes a holistic approach to Data Resource Management, Corporate Information Factory / Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence, Repository Management, Knowledge Co-ordination, Model Management, Business Process Re-engineering, Reverse Engineering and Re-engineering of IT Systems.

We are specialists in the Methods, Tools and Techniques which support a pragmatic approach to EA - one which strikes a balance between a long-term Architectural view on the one hand, and the very real need to have quick effective systems implementation and maintenance on the other hand.

Scope of Our EA Engagements 

The scope of the EA, in our view, is illustrated below in the Enterprise Architecture Framework as defined by John Zachman. 

The first three rows define the implementation independent business architecture, progressing from a contextual high level business view through to a detailed specification of the business processes required to support that view. The business architecture is defined in terms of the six interrogative columns:

•  Data architecture (What).

•  Functions and process architecture (How).

•  Locations/Networks configuration (Where).

•  Organization structure (Who).

•  Business events  (When).

•  Business strategies, visions, goals and rules (Why).

The intersection of a row and column is a cell (one of the squares). Each cell contains artefacts or objects relevant to that cell, e.g. row 2 column 2 contains all the business process objects. Relationships are maintained: 

•  Vertically representing the transformation from one level to another.

•  Horizontally representing relationships between artefacts on the same row.

The fourth through sixth rows define the technology and the applications in the current  IT environment, where the columns contain IT type artefacts corresponding to the six interrogative columns comprising the framework as bulleted above. Synchronization of the EA environment and the application development environment is implied by vertical relationships between business application architecture (row three) and technical processes (row four).

Our Approach to EA 

The typical EA Engagement will consist of a number of major tasks, all aimed at:

•  Aligning the Enterprise?s IT Investments with Business Process and Mission needs.

•  Creating the capability to sustain and absorb ever-increasing rates of change.

Our engagements have a strong emphasis on Organizational Change Management because the architected approach that we introduce is normally quite new to many corporations, and great care must be taken to ensure organization adoption: this new way of thinking about the enterprise?s assets needs to be woven very carefully into the fabric of the organization.  The major tasks involved in a typical EA Engagement include the following:

•  Program Management.

•  Process Architecture.

•  Data Architecture.

•  Application Architecture.

•  Technology Architecture.

•  EA Infrastructure.

•  EA Governance.

•  EA Communications.

•  Metadata Repository.

Gavroshe has dedicated Principal Consultants and Senior Consultants who have deep skills and years of experience in each of the above categories of work. We field an exceptionally strong team, with seniority levels matching the strategic importance of our customers? EA projects. Our team works with customer staff to achieve the following objectives: