Enterprise architecture
Enterprise architecture (EA) aims at optimising legacy or fragmented applications, information and technology into an integrated environment that facilitates easy decision making and change implementation.
An integrated technology environment (which includes business processes, applications, data and technology) can easily flex and respond to business demands and changes. This is because the impact of changes can be easily and quickly determined and the changes easily implemented and embedded across the enterprise. Effective management and exploitation of information through technology is a key factor in driving business success, and a crucial means to achieving competitive advantage.
Aligned with business strategy, we help clients in developing an enterprise architecture (includes application, information and infrastructure) with a broad understanding of the sub-competencies and experience of managing a design authority. We also support our clients embark on a IT transformation or change journey by putting an enterprise architecture function in place - or assessing their current capability or compliance, and ensuring the function is effectively built into their business as usual processes.
Areas of focus
- Application architecture
- Information architecture
- Infrastructure architecture
- Assessing & setting-up enterprise architecture functions
Application architecture
Our application architecture services can provide a blueprint for the individual application systems to be deployed, their interactions, and their relationships to the core business processes of the organization. Application architecture components includes: application service catalog, application inventory and types, functional requirements, application (service) relationship model, data flow diagram, interface model, application phasing model.
Information architecture
Our information architecture services provide data model design for enterprise-wide data objects and relationships such as person, entity, activity and offering. We can also provide detailed data definitions for the key attributes of each of these objects. Information architecture describes the structure of an organization's logical and physical data assets and data resources, includes: business key performance indicator catalog, information list / catalog, data dictionary, entity relationship model, information flow model and canonical data model.
Infrastructure architecture
Our infrastructure architecture services describe the technology infrastructure intended to support the deployment of core, mission-critical applications. The infrastructure architecture components usually include:
- Technology service catalog describing what non-functional components are provided by IT infrastructure, e.g. processing, storage, networking, security, presentation (clients), etc.
- Technology inventory and types showing, for each software application, what technology platforms are involved - vendors, hardware, versions, etc.
- Non-functional requirements that are the statements of performance or service level agreements required from IT infrastructure, e.g. scalability, availability, throughput, capacity, etc.
- Network diagram is a schematic which shows how applications, servers, data centers, clients and physical locations are connected, including network types, bandwidths, routers, firewalls, etc.
Assessing & setting-up enterprise architecture functions
PwC has developed an Enterprise Architecture Capability Assessment framework (based on established frameworks, such as TOGAF and COBIT) which can be used to assess the maturity of our clients’ enterprise architecture function. Our framework has been designed to assess the robustness of all architecture capabilities across the enterprise architecture governance, organizational function and processes, projects and contracts, compliance, tools and skills.
