Case Study Scene 3

Case Study: Danforth Manufacturing Company Scene 4: Developing Current and Future EA Views

CIO Sam Young and Chief Architect Vince Albright are leading an EA Working Group through the development of architecture segments that cover several lines of business at DMC. These segments of the overall DMC enterprise architecture will help COO Kate Jarvis and CFO Jim Gorman work together as they evaluate requirements and plan solutions for new information systems. Scene 3 had covered the need for a detailed implementation methodology, and this scene describes the approach the Working Group will take in documenting the current and future views of these segments of the DMC EA.

"Thank you for coming to today's meeting of the Enterprise Architecture Working Group" said Sam. We are going to talk about the method for developing current and future views of the two segments of the company's enterprise architecture we are developing. These segments cover manufacturing and production, which are the lines of business identified by Kate and Jim that require more IT support. At the last meeting we developed the detailed implementation methodology that will guide our efforts and reduce the risk that we will not be successful. Vince Albright, our Chief Architect, will describe the documentation of current and future views."

"Thank you Sam" said Vince. "In accordance with our implementation methodology, we will be using the EN framework to organize and guide the documentation of current and future views of these segments of the DMC architecture. Following the framework's structure, we will gather existing artifacts of information on the lines of business in the following order: strategic goals and initiatives, business services, information flows and data elements, systems and support services, and the network infrastructure. These documentation artifacts come in many forms including reports, policy memos, manuals, spreadsheets, briefing slides, diagrams, and video files. By organizing these artifacts in the online EA repository into categories that match the levels and areas of the framework, we can establish links between the information to produce robust new views of the lines of business. This also establishes a baseline of EA information for future planning and decision-making."

Vince continued. "As for documenting the future views, we will start by establishing several future operating scenarios with Jim, Kate and their staff members. These scenarios are short stories about possible future activities in a variety of friendly and hostile business climates. The scenarios help us to identify important planning assumptions about their future line of business activities, depending on the environment. Once the most probable scenario is selected, we will use the planning assumptions to guide discussions in our Working Group, and decisions by Jim and Kate on what they want to invest in to best position themselves for success in the future. Finally, we will identify how these decisions cause changes to the current EA at each level of the framework, and will document those changes in new artifacts that are saved in the EA repository in a separate future EA section."

Over the next several weeks, the EA Working Group gathered existing or developed new documentation artifacts for the current views of the two EA segments at each level of the EA framework. The Group then developed several future operating scenarios from which future view artifacts were developed.

Questions

1. Which framework was deployed by the company and what they decide to do initially?

2. What process was decided by them to gather future views, write comprehensive note.