The challenges facing organizations, their management methods, and the rapid pace of business changes have led many governmental and non-governmental institutions and private companies to adopt the best administrative tools and practices to develop their operations and activities.
The wise government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has sought to improve the performance of its government bodies, including ministries, authorities, and institutions across all specializations. Its goal is to transform them into a digital government that relies on best practices to achieve Vision 2030 through legislation, policies, establishing an Enterprise Architecture Office in each entity, and preparing a digital transformation plan. Therefore, it was necessary to adopt the concept of Enterprise Architecture as a key enabler for digital transformation.
What is Enterprise Architecture?
It’s a set of practices and controls concerned with implementing an organization’s vision and strategy by making the necessary changes to align business goals and procedures with the information technology used to achieve that vision. In general, Enterprise Architecture consists of an integrated system of interconnected parts and pillars (including administrative, organizational, procedural, and technical structures) that interact to achieve unified goals.
Enterprise Architecture provides several objectives, such as establishing compliance with regulations and legislation and aligning with the plans and policies of relevant entities. It serves as an analytical tool that provides modeling capabilities at all levels, clearly outlining the relationships and dependencies between all major domains (Business, Applications, Data, and Infrastructure). It tailors information technology to serve the business, thereby achieving the organization’s goals.
It’s also a planning tool for translating strategic thinking into a roadmap for future development and integration. It serves as a change management tool that provides a framework for synchronizing and coordinating development activities across multiple projects and developmental initiatives. Enterprise Architecture is considered a best practice because its implementation contributes to documentation, analysis, planning, modeling, and transformation governance.
What Services Does Enterprise Architecture Provide?
The most important services provided by Enterprise Architecture are:
- Achieving business strategy, vision, and the target operating model
- Improving business processes
- Enabling an understanding of strategic outcomes for each project
- Implementing administrative planning standards in coordination with project management
- Providing high flexibility for change by facilitating faster decision-making and avoiding the need for lengthy studies (customizing decision-making strategies)
- Analyzing the gap between the current and desired (future) state
- Enhancing information technology security
- Measuring maturity and the ability to leverage technology
- Assessing risks from a technical perspective
- Providing a specific perspective for all organization members:
- Senior Management: By utilizing well-understood and assessable documents to help them make decisions.
- Middle Management: By providing knowledge on how business operations work in an organized and understandable manner.
- Employees: By creating a simple concept that makes their work easier using technology.
- Human Resources: By understanding roles and skills.
- Information Technology: By properly understanding needs and aligning available technology to serve the business.
- Partners: When procedures and services are described in an organized and systematic way, partners can make appropriate decisions to approve them.
- Customers (Beneficiaries): By understanding the nature of the services provided to them and making the most of them.
How to Establish an Enterprise Architecture Office?
We will outline a simplified mechanism for establishing and operating an Enterprise Architecture Office. The establishment of an EA office relies on applying the clear steps of the National Overall Reference Architecture (NORA) methodology. Therefore, it’s essential to go through the following stages:
Stage 1: General Assessment of the Organization
This stage involves conducting a foundational assessment of the organization through:
- Analyzing the Current State This includes analyzing the work environment, measuring maturity levels, conducting a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), and identifying external influences on the organization (such as the policies of the Digital Government Authority and the National Data Management Office) and internal ones (such as the organizational structure). It also includes a list of requirements for key domains (Strategy, Business, Applications, Data, Technology, and Cybersecurity).
- Building Reference Models for the business, applications, data, technology, and cybersecurity domains.
- Enterprise Architecture Project Strategy
Stage 2: Establishing the Enterprise Architecture Office
The office establishment stage begins by laying the cornerstone for the office’s charter, which is represented by the Statement of Architecture Work. The charter includes two main parts:
- The Enterprise Architecture Office Operating Model The operating model is the beating heart of the office’s work and includes the office’s internal organizational structure, documentation of its services, roles and responsibilities assigned to all office members, work mechanisms for committees overseeing the office’s work and digital transformation, a communication and reporting mechanism, documented office procedures, the interaction model between the office and the organization’s departments, and performance indicators for the office’s work.
- The Enterprise Architecture Framework This is built based on national best practices such as the NORA methodology, as well as modern international methodologies like TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework). This framework is used to document:
- The principles, vision, and mission of Enterprise Architecture.
- The content framework, which illustrates the idea of representing Enterprise Architecture as a cube of information with three dimensions. The Scope dimension represents the targeted departments, the Domain dimension specifies the targeted areas (Business, Applications, Data, Technology, and Cybersecurity), and the Depth dimension represents the level of modeling (conceptual, logical, physical) for each targeted domain. The modeling outputs are artifacts (Building Blocks, Diagrams, Catalogs, Matrices).
- A descriptive model of Enterprise Architecture elements and domains.
Stage 3: Modeling
The establishment stage is followed by the Modeling stage. This stage involves:
- Documenting the Baseline Architecture of the targeted domains (Business, Applications, Data, Technology, and Cybersecurity) and analyzing all observations for each targeted domain.
- Documenting the Target Architecture based on the organization’s strategic goals.
- Conducting gap analysis by studying the results of the observations for each targeted domain and documenting recommendations and improvements.
Stage 4: Documentation
This is the stage for documenting the Digital Transformation Roadmap. This stage involves analyzing the outputs of the business domain modeling, prioritizing improvements, and converting them into initiatives and projects to be adopted and approved by the organization to achieve integrated digital transformation.
Finally, the importance of establishing an Enterprise Architecture Office in organizations comes from its effective role in improving and increasing the efficiency of services, eliminating duplication and redundancy in technical projects, providing services that align with the requirements and needs of beneficiaries, and accelerating digital transformation initiatives. Enterprise Architecture is responsible for supervising and monitoring information technology projects and their requirements and providing all forms of support to make them compatible with national and international directions and policies.
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