Enterprise Architecture (EA) is about the organizational and technological entities in an enterprise, and the relations between them. As an activity, the goal of EA is to improve how all these entities support the business and IT goals in a better way, not just solution by solution, project by project, but for the business as a whole.

Each of these perspectives are assessed, evaluated and defined in several phases, both with respect to today’s situation and the target architecture.

• process maps
• identification of business process improvement candidates
• target business process designs

• capturing the concepts flowing through the essential business processes
• defining an information model supporting future processes
• enabling masterdata management
• enalbing the definition of a common domain model in a service oriented architecture

• which applications are used by which users, in which business units, supporting which functions
• evaluating consolidation vs. best-of-breed options
• information architecture and application architecture – assessing scattered information entities and defining which applications should master which data

• service composition architecture
• high level interfaces between business critical applications
• information architecture and SOA – using business language to build a common information model across all system specific information models