Coherency Management

In the book, the editors present the idea that we can speak about different modes of EA, i.e., different ways of practising enterprise architecture.

Foundation Architecture
The most common and classical form of EA is what we call Foundation Architecture. The EA is most often done to align IT to the business. The Foundation Architecture can be seen in the most widely accepted definition of EA provided by Ross, Weill and Robertson where “EA is defined as the organizing logic for an organization’s core business processes and IT capabilities captured in a set of policies and technical choices, to achieve business standardization and integration requirements of the firm’s operating model”.

Extended Architecture
The concepts of Extended Architecture came about in the late 1990’s and focused on engineering an entire enterprise from an integrated strategy, business, and technology perspective. To support this expanded view of EA, a number of approaches and tools were developed to provide standardized, repeatable methods for describing an enterprise in all dimensions – beyond just the IT perspective. Whereas Foundation Architecture used architecture methods and tools to capture business requirements in order to design better IT systems, in the Extended approach, architecture methods and tools capture strategic goals and related business requirements in order to design the enterprise.

Embedded Architecture
In the Foundation and Extended modes of EA, artifacts (various types of documentation) are created as the result of an EA process or method, somewhat extraneous to the functioning enterprise. With Embedded EA, architecture tools, methods, and models become embedded in the normal (usually existing) processes of the day. Rather than relying on processes and people extraneous to the business programs (and their processes), the architecture is produced by the processes themselves. In this way the architecture is organic and ever greened naturally.

Balanced Architecture
Balanced Architecture is a term that is used to describe when an enterprise utilizes the best and the most appropriate characteristics of each of the three modes of EA. It is unlikely that any organization has yet reached a level of maturity in their EA program, so as to have a truly balanced architecture state.

In Chapter 8, Grasso and Bernard present a maturity model based on these modes.