September 24, 2008 By David Aden
For many agency heads or department managers, any mention of "Enterprise Architecture" causes emotional reactions ranging from fear to outright antagonism. Often enterprise architecture has come to mean "yet another IT project and expense which I don't have time for and from which I won't see any tangible results." For others, it is simply a checkbox that must be filled to get the money needed to get real work done.
But what is Enterprise Architecture really? And who is it intended to benefit?
Many complicated definitions and explanations could be presented, but at the core, enterprise architecture is very simple: it starts with the idea that one should plan technology purchases and development ahead of time and -- here's the important part -- that the business people, not technology people, should determine what is needed (the requirements).
The classic analogy in a non-high tech realm is building a home. Telling an architect to "build me a house!" is not nearly enough information. The architect needs details about how many people will live in it, what kinds of activities it needs to support, the quality of furnishings to use, how long it needs to last, , etc.
And those are just the high-level questions. A thousand and one details will need to be filled in below these by all the individual tradesman who help build the house.
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