What Is Enterprise Architecture? Daniel Minoli Architecture can be seen as a blueprint for the optimal and target-conformant placement of resources in the IT environment for the ultimate support of the business function. As described in American National Standards Institute/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ANSI/IEEE) Std 1471- 2000, an architecture is "the fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution." A metaphor can be drawn by thinking of a corporate/IT blueprint for the planning of a city or a large development. Specifically, then, the blueprint provides the macro view of how elements (roads, lots, utilities-read: platforms, networks, applications, applications' logical components) fit, particularly in relation with one another. In this book we make use of terms such as "enterprise architecture, the current blueprint" (or "enterprise architecture," or "enterprise architecture description"), and "enterprise architecture blueprint for the target state" (or "target state enterprise architecture" or "target state enterprise architecture description".) See Appendix 1.1 for a more formal definition. The goal of enterprise architecture is to create a unified IT environment (standardized hardware and software systems) across the firm or all of the firm's business units, with tight symbiotic links to the business side of the organization (which typically is 90% of the firm as seen earlier, at least by way of budget) and its strategy. More specifically, the goals are to promote alignment, standardization, reuse of existing IT assets, and the sharing of common methods for project management and software development across the organization. The end result, theoretically, is that the enterprise architecture will make IT cheaper, more strategic, and more responsive. The purpose of enterprise architecture is to create a map of IT assets and business processes and a set of governance principles that drive an ongoing discussion about business strategy and how it can be expressed through IT. There are many different suggested frameworks to develop an enterprise architecture, as discussed later on. However, most frameworks contain four basic domains, as follows: 1. Business architecture: documentation that outlines the company's most important business processes; 2. Information architecture: identifies where important blocks of information, such as a customer record, are kept and how one typically accesses them; 3. Application system architecture: a map of the relationships of software applications to one another; and 4. The infrastructure technology architecture: a blueprint for the gamut of hardware, storage systems, and networks. The business architecture is