What is Enterprise Architecture? Definition, Layers, and Business Benefits

Enterprise architecture is a crucial discipline for organizations seeking to connect their long-term strategy with effective technology solutions. But what does it involve, and why has it become so important for businesses of all sizes?

This article breaks down the essentials of enterprise architecture, explains its core layers, and highlights how it can provide a roadmap for innovation and growth. Read on to see how this approach can guide your organization toward a more agile and efficient future.

What is enterprise architecture?

Enterprise architecture refers to the process of organization and standardizing the IT infrastructure to transition to a desired future state. It maps the business operations and technology systems, models business capabilities and identifies the limitations.

It works as a blueprint to reorganize your IT infrastructure systems to align with your business goals. Consider it as a way to define roles, responsibilities and workflows to add new business capabilities, typically in the form of new services to your enterprise application portfolio.

Moving beyond traditional approaches

Traditionally, an enterprise architecture practice felt like an academic exercise. External consultants would put together diagrams and charts to illustrate systems and processes. Afterwards, your IT teams and business operations would develop a plan to migrate legacy processes and systems to new technologies. Only then would the organization refer to this as a digital transformation journey.

There’s a lot more to enterprise architecture than diagrams and IT models that may not capture all aspects of your enterprise processes. Enterprise architecture is not just about technology, but also about a cross-disciplinary effort that connects the strategic vision of your organization (the business side) with operational execution (through technology).

Four layers of enterprise architecture

To better understand how enterprise architecture operates, it is helpful to break it down into four key layers. Each layer has a distinct focus and purpose, yet they all work together to achieve organizational alignment.

1. Strategic and transformation layer

This layer connects the vision of the organization to its strategic business goals. Here, you define transformation initiatives that can bridge the gap between the current and future states of the business.

Key questions to consider:

• What is the desired future state for your business?
• What technology and operational shifts are needed to get there?

At this layer, you define an objective. For example, you might aim to increase direct-to-consumer sales by 30%. To do this, you establish a platform that enables a new sales channel, such as a digital platform for B2B ecommerce. Once the proof of concept is successful, you operationalize a dedicated business function for sales, marketing, engineering, and customer support.

2. Business architecture layer

Transitioning to the next layer, business architecture is where the organizational structure changes to add new business capabilities depending on the available business context.

For example, you may need to open your B2B ecommerce service to new geographic markets. This will require you to create new business functions for compliance, marketing, and customer relationships in each region. At this stage, you define what your business does in each market, and how it delivers value to its customers.

You may need to establish new processes and workflows and create new roles and responsibilities that can bridge the gap between strategy and actual execution.

3. Application and data architecture layer

At this layer, the focus shifts to applications, data flows, and information assets that support business capabilities.

You identify the business needs and processes and try to figure out what technology capabilities can help automate and execute the process workflows. This involves identifying data sources, software solutions, and delivering an interface for users to engage a business service. The goal is to align applications and data assets with the operational demands of your business.

For example, you may have your CRM data stored in the Salesforce platform and want to integrate it with SAP for supply chain operations in new markets. In this case, this enterprise architecture layer is responsible for determining how these two systems interface and interact for real-time and batch processing.

Key design considerations:

• Design integration points using APIs.
• Preprocess data according to applicable regional laws such as GDPR for user anonymization.
• Set up secure access channels and networks to streamline application performance and secure data access in new geographic regions.

4. Technical architecture layer

Lastly, the technical architecture layer defines your technology stack to run applications and services, store data, and enable network communications.

You select your service provider, such as AWS or Azure for a public cloud service. You identify the IT components across infrastructure (IaaS) and platforms (PaaS) that will run your applications and data workloads.

This also includes selecting technology categories, such as:

• Services and databases.
• Kubernetes clusters.
• Object storage.
• Load balancers.
• Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).

(Related reading: CDNs vs load balancers.)

Your choices may include relational or cloud-native databases, containerized microservices as application runtimes, and security services such as IAM and firewalls.

It also involves decision-making around deployment models (multicloud vs. hybrid vs. on-premise), scalability and performance optimization, business continuity, and compliance. The goal of this layer is to ensure that technology resources are available, secure, and scalable to fulfill the growing needs of the business.

The value of enterprise architecture

Thinking of enterprise architecture as a structural blueprint for your technology systems helps encourages more collaboration between business and IT. This approach allows business organizations to prioritize their technology investments and align them with strategic objectives.

Enterprise Architecture achieves this with a structured approach, which is outlined in several popular frameworks:

• The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF).
• The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture.
• Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF).
• European Space Agency Architectural Framework (ESAAF), and more.

These frameworks offer structured methods to implement Enterprise Architecture across all four layers. This is a more effective alternative to organically adding technologies and processes into your Enterprise Architecture without direction.