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Managing an enterprise architecture is a challenging task. While careful planning typically goes into its design, an enterprise architecture actually emerges as a result of implementing individual projects. It is this de facto architecture, not the conceptual one, that provides the capabilities for executing business strategies, and understanding this emergent architecture is of paramount importance. In this paper, we present the Four-Domain Architecture (FDA), which integrates business process, information, knowledge, and elements pertaining to infrastructure and organization. The FDA approach can help guide the development of both the conceptual and emergent architecture. The FDA helps an enterprise in the definition, design, and creation of a set of tools and methods to support frameworks such as the Zachman framework.
As an enterprise grows in size and complexity, several factors impede its abilities to solve the problems that it faces. The point is rapidly reached where the factors that come into play in structuring and conducting the business of the enterprise become too numerous and complex to manage. When working on such complex systems, designers have typically dealt with this complexity by breaking them into subsets or domains that are less complex than the original system.1-3
In the case of information systems, the abstraction used to deal with complexity is called an architecture. An architecture is a system design that specifies how the overall functionality of the design is to be decomposed into individual functional components and the way in which these components are to interact to provide the overall functionality of the system. The decomposition of the enterprise into manageable parts, the definition of those parts, and the orchestration of the interaction among those parts constitutes the enterprise architecture. The orchestration of the interaction is governed by a set of design rules and principles, also called the organization's knowledge architecture.4,5
Architecture design has benefited from the work done in the context of systems architecting6 and the design of buildings7 and information systems.8,9 Other authors writing on product design and development10,11 have stressed the importance of managing the evolution and renewal of product architecture for sustained competitiveness. In that context, the architecture of a product refers to its overall design concept, which serves both as a basis for product innovation and as a constraint on...