Over the past few years, as software and systems engineering has matured, it has become accepted that there is a clear need for an 'architectural view' of systems. This need has grown as a result of the increasing complexity of systems and their interactions within and between businesses. Furthermore, continued pressure to reduce IT costs and deliver real, quantifiable business benefit from solutions necessitate a clear understanding of how systems support and enable the business.
When considering how organizations typically manage business change and IT enablement, traditional approaches to strategic business change use a top down view of the business in terms of its people and processes. However, the traditional software and systems engineering approaches tend to focus on identifying and delivering the specific functionality required to automate a task or activity. Less importance is attached to how the resulting system will interact with other systems and the rest the business in order to deliver wider business benefit. As a result, there is often a gap between the high level vision and structure of the business, and the systems implemented to support them (in other words the alignment between business and IT is poor).
Enzen has a practice group that focus mainly on the defining the solution architecture based on our client’s business requirements. This group has breadth of knowledge on solution architecture and its benefits and helps us in building a solution framework that will deliver significant business benefits based on the industry sector. At Enzen we understand that it is important to classify business and IT architecture into a number of different levels:
