Enterprise Architecture - Enterprise Architecture is a difficult concept.  In a nutshell, it involves describing the “big picture” of the enterprise in terms of key business, information, application and technology strategies and their associated impact on the enterprise’s business functions and processes.

One of the primary goals for the enterprise architecture is to enable rapid and controlled change. Enterprise architectures that achieve this goal are characterized by the following properties:

· Consistency: solutions that establish harmony between the existing environment and the new or enhanced infrastructure, systems, or business processes
· Extensibility: encompasses the entire enterprise
· Scalability: solutions that can grow and adapt to changing business requirements as required
· Supportability: solutions that the enterprise can easily, and cost-effectively support
· Comprehensiveness: broadest possible solution approach to support the complete enterprise at its fullest extent.
· Change Driven: adaptive to the change, with controls in place to assess the business value of any changes
· Reuse Driven: supports reusability while meeting cost challenges

An enterprise architecture encompasses four key architectural views – enterprise business architecture; enterprise information architecture; enterprise technology architecture; and enterprise application architecture. Together, these respective views provide a comprehensive perspective of the enterprise. Enterprise architecture is described in conjunction with the enterprise application portfolio. The enterprise application portfolio provides a view of functions needed to meet business needs.