95 percent of organizations will support multiple approaches to enterprise architecture by 2015: Gartner

In the next three to five years more
organizations will aspire to support a blended approach to enterprise
architecture (EA) according to href="http://www.dqweek.com/Global-IT-spend-to-touch-$3.4-trillion-in-2010-Gartner">Gartner.
Its analysts predict that 95
percent of organizations will support multiple approaches to EA by
2015. "Businesses are realizing that there is no one way to
support EA. Decisions may be heavily influenced by a business context
and the organization's business landscape, people and politics,
future state vision and experience. Regardless of the approach, EA
must facilitate change. The key is to create, not the perfect or
elegant architecture for the moment, but the most adaptable
architecture for the future," said Julie Short, Research
Director, Gartner.

Gartner has identified four basic
approaches to EA and these are traditional, federated, middle out and
managed diversity. Analysts said that the majority of clients will
support a mixture of more than one of these approaches based on their
business needs.

Traditional-In this approach the
EA team engages the organization to facilitate the EA process,
focused on prescriptive content that serves to guide project decision
making consistent with the 'master plan' embodied in the
architecture. Most of the standard industry frameworks and processes
support a traditional approach to EA which delivers very specific
directives to project on how to develop solutions that will meet
business requirements, while reducing complexity in technology,
information and business processes. This approach tends to work well
in organizations where decision making is largely centralized and is
relatively stable in terms of pace of change. It does not work well
in organizations where decision-making and authority are distributed
and where the pace of business change is high.

Federation style="font-weight: normal;">-
In large, complex organizations, decision making is often
largely decentralized with business units having considerable
autonomy over the EA that is required to support the needs of their
particular business unit. A federated architecture is focused on
defining the core and common elements between business areas/units.
This approach is well suited to distributed organizations and this is
an approach that is often post merger and acquisition or market
consolidation to implement a more coordinated strategy. This approach
is less effective in highly centralized organizations with a
homogeneous business.

Managed diversity-Managed
diversity architecture is focused on defining choices or options.
This EA approach is focused on balancing the need for a set of
standards with the need for a diversity of solutions to increase
innovation, business growth and competitive advantage. Project teams
can decide which product best fits the project needs, rather than
having a single standard imposed on them. The advantage of this
approach is that it enables users and project teams to select the
right tool for the job, enabling innovation through diversity. The
disadvantage of this approach is that users and project teams must
accept more responsibility for their choices.

Middle-out architecture is an approach
to EA whereby architects focus on managing the key dependencies among
those parts of the organization that have the biggest impact on the
ability to change. A middle-out approach focuses on architecting
interoperability by defining a small but rigidly enforced set of
general, stable interface standards, while allowing complete autonomy
of decision making for the specific technologies and products that
are used within the solutions. This approach is highly suited for
organizations and "business ecosystems," where the business
units, partners, and suppliers are not under the direct control of a
central EA team.

"The reality is that most
organizations do not apply a single approach to EA in a pure form.
Rather, they use a number of different approaches in different areas,
resulting in a blended reality that truly meets the needs of their
business,” said Betsy Burton, VP, Gartner

With a blended approach to EA,
organizations seek to determine the appropriate balance of
architectural control and freedom by applying the appropriate EA
approach. This means that the EA team needs to determine a decision
framework that enables them to evaluate and weigh which approach for
any given solution, technology, information or business may be the
most appropriate.