Guide to the (Evolving) Enterprise Architecture Body of Knowledge

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a rapidly evolving but still immature discipline; however, there is considerable knowledge about the discipline available. Capturing and organizing that knowledge will help practitioners advance the discipline by both defining and bounding EA concepts and practices and help others by explaining and showing guide for technical developers.

Purpose of the Guide:

The Guide to the EABOK is a guide, not the EA body of knowledge itself. Scope relationships among the elements of the discipline. An EA describes how the elements of an organization fit together – the business processes, organizations responsible for them, Information Technology (IT) capabilities and infrastructure – today and in the future. The EA also describes how the elements transition to support the organization’s strategic plans. Federal agencies are required to develop an EA to facilitate capital planning and IT development sequencing. In addition, the EA defines high level interoperability needs and specifies standards. It is a useful The purpose of the Guide to the EA Body of Knowledge (EABOK) is to provide a characterization of and structure to the knowledge content of the EA discipline, promote a consistent view of EA, begin to bound the scope of the discipline, and place the EA discipline in the context of related disciplines. The guide provides topical access to the EABOK. It subdivides EA into knowledge areas and topics within each knowledge area, presents overviews of each topic, and gives references to sources of further information. The reader may observe that some overviews are summaries of several specific methods or techniques. At the current level of maturity EA evolution, no definitive ‘winner’ of that particular area has yet emerged, but there are dominant contributors. Other overviews are more in-depth tutorials because suitable reference materials for the topic have not been developed. As the field matures and EA becomes more of an engineering discipline, a more even presentation of topic overviews will be provided.

Scope:

The Guide to the EABOK addresses the purpose, creation, engineering, use, evaluation, and management of an EA and associated best practices, governance, legislation, and guidance. The guide also relates the EA to other disciplines. It does not address the implementation of the EA through the closely related discipline of Enterprise Engineering (EE) in this first edition.