Understanding the IS Heritage for EA

Contrary to what most practitioners (and some academics) seem to assume, the definitions of EA that we see in the emerging IS literature on EA should not be seen in contrast to IS traditions like Information Engineering, Information Systems Architecture or Strategic Information Systems Planning.
Traditional ISD and much of the IS literature about IE and ISA has a technical focus where the basic idea is about producing a project plan, not choosing the project or, even better, providing the framework in order to choose. This type of planning is practical at the systems level but leads to lost business opportunities and incompatible systems, data stores and architectures. Here, a typical EA encompasses an overview of the entire information systems – including software and hardware. According to Schekkerman (2004) modern EA is a master plan which “acts as a collaboration force” between aspects of business planning such as goals, visions, strategies and governance principles; aspects of business operations such as business terms, organizational structure, processes and data; aspects of automation such as information systems and databases; and the enabling technological infrastructures of the business such as computers, operating systems and networks. In this sense, EA is a multidimensional discipline with an extensive scope that needs to cover a wide variety of viewpoints, deliverables, and processes across the whole enterprise. A fully articulated architecture constitutes enterprise architecture: the integration of business, data, information, and technology into a coherent whole. In the figure below, I have tried to illustrate this distinction between a business focus and a technical focus placing the different IS traditions into a simple two-by-two matrix.

The Y-axis in the figure represents the business and process focus that is evident in the SISP approach. Along this axis IS business needs and the possibility to gain a competitive advantage from implementing IS is considered while the technical implementation “details” and alignment is less important. The other axis in the matrix, the X-axis, has a technical focus where data and technical ISA’s are considered most important in the development of IS. Here we find the data focus in IE and the technically focused ISA’s.
EA is placed in the upper right corner of the figure because it claims to have both a technical and a business focus. The dotted read arrow illustrates the IS evolution; starting as a technical discipline in the 1960’s, IS began to focus on business needs in the 1980’s and 1990’s with SISP and trends like BPR, and we now see EA claiming to encompass all the different domains in the IS discipline in on holistic perspective, including enterprise design from organization, information, systems, products, processes to applications.