What is Enterprise Architecture (EA) and why is it important? EA concepts explained in a simple way.

what is enterprise architecture is it important the business ecosystem is getting complex and your company has to transform itself to thrive in the future change is in the form of competition from startups and legacy companies technology is introducing new business models customers have higher expectations and regulations are changing fast so what do you do I'll tell you why you need Enterprise Architecture to navigate this complexity but first hit that subscribe button and click on the bell icon so you get notified of new videos on architecture and AI that I share every other week take any

business it has many parts parts like processes products data people technologies and many more these parts have to somehow work together to create and deliver value so that the customer will buy whatever the business is selling and the business is profitable how do you understand how these parts fit together that's the purpose of enterprise architecture or EA EA is a conceptual framework that describes how the business is constructed EA identifies a few primary components and shows the relationship between these exactly what we need to understand so that the business we build delivers the value it

is supposed to while we talk about a business EA principles can be applied to any organizational entity like a business of course government an association a non-profit or even a loose enterprise that's interested in say solving problems like world hunger that's why we use the word enterprise and call it enterprise architecture different people want to understand different things about how their organization works on top of that environments in which these organizations are operating is complex that's why EA is also evolving and becoming more important than ever think of how your own organization is operating today

is that environment complex then type in the word complex in the comment section below one main focus of year is to simplify the complexity and understand how business and technology work together because business models change and the technology is advancing fast we need even more alignment between the two let's talk about four domains of EA business architecture is about capturing how a business operates like how important business processes do what they do by using the appropriate capabilities and the right information in the context of the organization it models other things like roles and responsibilities metrics

products projects and so on by modeling the business using architecture one of the things we can figure out is how information technology or IT supports the business today all businesses use software but designing and using the right software is not trivial as your company built or bought software but over time the requirements have changed then the software is not able to adapt and the users are left frustrated you keep adding new features but since the architecture is weak it has become a patchwork and you end up spending a lot of time and money just to

maintain it if that's the case in your company just type the word yes below don't worry all legacy companies are facing this problem you're not alone application architecture defines the software solutions that help businesses do their job and adapt to change applications need data to work as your enterprise data get more complex and you want to capture a lot more information about your customers interactions with your company their preferences your products prices and a whole lot of other stuff you need a better way to manage and use his data which is probably stored in different

formats like documents spreadsheets databases emails and more data architecture does that for you modeling the sources the formats management quality and whole lot of other things many companies today work with petabytes of data which is a million gigabytes can you see why we need data architecture because it's complex and then we need physical machines wires routers storage and software to go with all these to support all the stuff that we just talked about this is the technology architecture that describes the underlying infrastructure ultimately needed to run the business applications for IT to serve business it

has to be aligned and we need a comprehensive view of all four of these domains EA is the best way to do that that way technology falls into place for the business to achieve its goals making them real by supporting its operations he is not just an IT concern but also a business concern because the whole story begins with the business expressing what objectives they want to achieve an IT answering that with how they're going to achieve it IT has to make sure that whatever is built can adapt to change because business will always change

and that's because their market environment and customers change I'll leave you with one nail-biting thought cloud vendors want to take the complexity of all this away from the business so they can put all this on the cloud and you only pay for what you use scale quickly with a push of a button you think your problems with managing IT investments go away wrong you still need EA to understand how and where all these applications data and infrastructure will be managed to deliver value to the business on this video I collaborated with Christine Stevenson over at

EA learning if you enjoyed watching this video please consider subscribing thank you [Music]