---
name: enterprise-architecture
description: Use when asked to align an organization's business processes, information systems, and technology infrastructure at the whole-enterprise level — business/information/technology/application architecture — as distinct from a single system's software-architecture.
---

# Enterprise Architecture (EA)

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a discipline that helps organizations
align their business processes, information systems, and technology
infrastructure to achieve their strategic goals — providing a strategic
framework to manage complexity, optimize resources, and improve
performance across the whole organization, not just a single system.

## Key areas

- **Business architecture** — the organization's business processes,
  organizational structure, and operational goals.
- **Information architecture** — the organization's data assets,
  information flows, and information systems.
- **Technology architecture** — the organization's hardware, software,
  and network infrastructure.
- **Application architecture** — the organization's software
  applications and how they support business processes and information
  flows; this is where EA connects down to
  [[software-architecture]]'s system-level concerns.

## Benefits

EA helps organizations improve agility, responsiveness, and innovation:
having a clear, organization-wide understanding of business processes,
information flows, and technology infrastructure lets an organization
identify improvement opportunities, optimize resources, and adapt more
quickly to changing business requirements. EA is also critical for
regulatory compliance and industry-standard conformance — a clear
architectural picture makes it easier to identify risks and
vulnerabilities in information systems and to develop mitigation
strategies.

## EA vs. software architecture, scoped

EA operates at the level of the whole organization — spanning many
systems, teams, and business units — while
[[software-architecture]] operates at the level of a single system
or product. A large organization typically has one enterprise
architecture and many software architectures beneath it, each
constrained by and contributing to the enterprise-level picture.

## Common pitfalls

- **Treating EA as purely a technology exercise** — EA's business and
  information architecture layers are just as central as its technology
  layer; an EA effort that only produces network diagrams has missed
  most of the discipline's actual scope.
- **Producing EA documentation that's never referenced** — an
  enterprise architecture that doesn't actively inform project
  prioritization ([[enterprise-portfolio-project-management]]) or
  system design decisions becomes shelfware.
- **No governance mechanism to keep it current** — EA describes a
  moving target (the organization); without a process for updating it as
  systems and structure change, it goes stale quickly.
- **Conflating enterprise and software architecture** — applying EA-level
  thinking to a single system's internal design (or vice versa) misses
  the different scope and audience each is meant for.

## Learn more

- [[software-architecture]] for the system-level counterpart to EA's organization-level scope.
- [[enterprise-portfolio-project-management]] for how EA connects to project prioritization and resourcing.
- [[arc42]] for documenting an individual system's architecture within a broader EA context.