Using Enterprise Architecture as a Means of Understanding Institutional Technology Ecosystems

Modern institutions use different kinds of complex business applications to support organizational activities to fulfil their institutional mandate. These business applications often run on a variety of technology platforms within the institutional premises or through cloud computing services. In the past, information technology (IT) professionals provided a simple diagram of business applications to help non-IT professionals understand the technology ecosystem. However, most modern institutions have increasingly complex technology environments. Therefore, non-IT professionals in such institutions face challenges related to best understanding complexities to enhance understanding and improve overall work performance. Enterprise Architecture (EA), a discipline in the IT field, emerged in the 1980s to provide models so that IT professionals could better manage complexity in modern institutions. The EA field allows for the vertical integration of strategic direction with tactical concepts, design decisions, and operations. In addition, it allows for the horizontal alignment of business changes with technology and vice versa. At the point of EA's emergence, information system engineers realized that they could only design suitable software components if they understood how the organization worked as defined by its processes, organizational structure, and goals. Over time, the concept matured to become a discipline that provides a philosophy, methodologies, and tools to develop, realize, and operate competitive enterprises. EA models differ from pure business process models as they holistically describe related enterprise capabilities and different layers' assets. Beginning in the mid-1980s, IT practitioners developed different sets of EA frameworks. The most commonly used were the Zachman framework, the open group architectural framework (TOGAF), and the federal enterprise architecture (FEA) framework. This article outlines the development of the EA discipline and demonstrates how TOGAF has been used by an institution to align business capabilities with technology and information components. The article draws from a study that constituted four steps. It elaborates on the first two steps, which indicates the paths of the third and fourth steps.