Integrated Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architectures and integration are crucial for the public and private sector industries. Government should take part in development of an overall architecture that captures the activities of people, processes, and technologies and specifies how all these activities work with each other in a smooth and integrated manner. The architecture must be based on a strategic plan and explore a large number of people, process and technology issues for it to succeed.

Today’s modern enterprises, both in the public as well as private sector, represent networks of autonomous firms cooperating with each other to achieve some common business goals. In such a scenario in order to survive and thrive in the rapidly changing environment, a firm’s supply, production, logistics and distribution networks need to be designed in an integrated and flexible fashion to quickly respond to fluctuating market conditions and frequent mergers, acquisitions, and outsourcing operations. Hence, the three essential components of an enterprise can be categorized as Business strategies, applications, and IT infrastructure.

For example, a manufacturing company acquires multiple other companies with widely varying systems based on the different technologies and vintages, here an enterprise wide architecture is needed that makes the acquired and the existing systems work smoothly with each other.

Integrated enterprise architecture (IEA) will be a key tool for competitive advantage because it would smoothly inter-weave the IT operations with the business strategy that can be of great value to the organizational management.

Enterprise architecture (EA) shows various components of an enterprise, their activities, and their interfaces and interactions with each other.

An EA can help clarify and optimize the interdependencies and correlations among an organization’s business operations and the underlying IT infrastructure and applications supporting these operations

IEA promises many benefits like identifying existing resources, improving integration among resources, facilitating business process improvement, and creating speed and efficiency in meeting changing business requirements through IT.

To survive in the fierce competition, companies have embarked on streamlining initiatives to reduce product development and product delivery time. To meet this objective, some enterprise-wide integrated systems are needed:

• Procurement systems linking order processing with payment, shipping and inventory management
• Manufacturing systems that link suppliers, designers, product managers and production planners in a uniform fashion.
• Customer support systems that link customer service with marketing, sales and customer relationship management.
• Health information networks linking hospitals, doctors, pharmacies and health insurance corporations
• Supply chain management systems linking several suppliers with the material requirement planning (MRP) systems of consumers.