Organisations Will Support Multiple Approaches To Enterprise Architecture By 2015

In the next three to five years, more organisations will aspire to support a blended approach to enterprise architecture (EA), according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner analysts predict that 95 per cent of organisations will support multiple approaches to EA by 2015.

"Businesses are realising that there is no one way to support EA," said Julie Short, Research Director, Gartner. "Decisions may be heavily influenced by a business context and the organisation’s business landscape, people and politics, future state vision and experience. Regardless of the approach, EA must facilitate change. The key is to create, not the perfect or elegant architecture for the moment, but the most adaptable architecture for the future."

Gartner has identified four basic approaches to EA - traditional, federated, middle out and managed diversity. Analysts said that the majority of clients will in reality, support a mixture of more than one of these approaches based on their business needs.

Traditional - In this approach, the EA team engages the organisation to facilitate the EA process, focused on prescriptive content that serves to guide project decision making consistent with the "master plan" embodied in the architecture. This approach tends to work well in organisations where decision-making is largely centralised and are relatively stable in terms of the pace of change.

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Federated - A federated architecture is focused on defining the core and common elements between business areas/units. This approach is well suited to distributed organisations and this is an approach that is often post merger & acquisition or market consolidation to implement a more coordinated strategy.

Managed diversity - Managed-diversity architecture is focused on defining choices or options. This EA approach is focused on balancing the need for a set of standards with the need for a diversity of solutions to increase innovation, business growth and competitive advantage. Project teams can decide which product best fits the project needs, rather than having a single standard imposed on them. The advantage of this approach is that it enables users and project teams to select the right tool for the job, enabling innovation through diversity. The disadvantage of this approach is that users and project teams must accept more responsibility for their choices.

Middle-out - Middle-out architecture is an approach to EA whereby architects focus on managing the key dependencies among those parts of the organisation that have the biggest impact on the ability to change. A middle-out approach focuses on architecting interoperability by defining a small but rigidly enforced set of general, stable interface standards, while allowing complete autonomy of decision making for the specific technologies and products that are used within the solutions. This approach is highly suited for organisations and "business ecosystems," where the business units, partners, and suppliers are not under the direct control of a central EA team.

"The reality is that most organisations do not apply a single approach to EA in a pure form," said Betsy Burton, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner. "Rather, they use a number of different approaches in different areas, resulting in a blended reality that truly meets the needs of their business."

With a blended approach to EA, organisations seek to determine the appropriate balance of architectural control and freedom by applying the appropriate EA approach. This means that the EA team needs to determine a decision framework that enables them to evaluate and weigh which approach for any given solution, technology, information or business may be the most appropriate.