Wikipedia defines Enterprise Architecture (EA) as the practice of applying a comprehensive and rigorous method for describing a current and/or future structure and behavior for an organization's processes, information systems, personnel and organizational sub-units, so that they align with the organization's core goals and strategic direction.
Enterprise Architecture - The Challenge
Any EA project will need to focus on: the business activities performed; the data sets and information flows needed to perform the activities; the applications and software needed to capture and manipulate the information sets; and the technology needed to run these applications.
From the data perspective, it will be important to develop ‘as is ‘and ‘to be’ data models
- what state is the data in today and how does it need to be structured going forward.
In other words a key part of any Enterprise Architecture project is the use of classic data modeling techniques, skills and tools.
However, because Enterprise Architecture involves systematic analysis of all resources, processes & data across the organisation, the data modelling challenge requires a similarly broad and systematic approach.
There is no simple quick fix to the challenge - it is an ongoing process of discovery, documentation and debate between technical & business communities in the organisation.
Enterprise Applications – adding to the Enterprise Architecture Data Modeling Challenge
Enterprise Applications such as SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft etc only add to this data modeling challenge, due to the complexity & opaqueness of their data architectures.
Given that such packages are now the major delivery mechanism of corporate business processes and sources of data, it is critical that they can be integrated in any data modeling or metadata management strategy in support of Enterprise Architecture initiatives.
Saphir technology remains the only toolset dedicated to delivering such EA metadata intelligence and directly interfacing to the leading data modeling tools.
Thereby allowing the exploration and comparison of data structures from multiple complex application environments.
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