Responding quickly and flexibly to changing customer needs and company goals is of vital importance to companies. This causes significant changes in strategic goals, principles, products, processes, organization, applications and infrastructure - all of which need to be clearly explicated in advance. Many organizations struggle to get a grip on these complex changes, because there is no consistent and up-to-date overview of the current landscape of products, processes, applications, and infrastructure. Analyzing the impact of a proposed change is therefore a difficult task, and communication over these changes between stakeholders from different departments is cumbersome.

Enterprise Architecture: Managing change and complexity

Enterprise architecture helps you managing change and complexity in your organization. Enterprise architecture captures and visualizes the different business and IT domains and their relationships. Enterprise architecture facilitates impact-of change analysis, and helps you communicating between different stakeholders and departments. Moreover, enterprise architecture facilitates assessing and reducing the cost and risks of change.

To be successful with enterprise architecture, systematic methods, a clear modeling language, and effective tool support are indispensable.

• TOGAF, The Open Group Architecture Framework, is a structured method providing a stepwise approach to implement and use Enterprise Architecture in your organization. TOGAF is an open standard, maintained by The Open Group.
• ArchiMate is an open and independent modeling language for enterprise architecture. ArchiMate provides instruments to support enterprise architects in describing, analyzing and visualizing the relationships among business domains in an unambiguous way. ArchiMate is an open standard, maintained by The Open Group.
• Architect is an easy to use and powerful tool for enterprise architecture. Architect provides capabilities to model, structure and visualize the enterprise architecture contents in different ways. The underlying repository stores and manages this enterprise architecture information, providing views, queries, reuse, access control and versioning to a variety of different roles and projects.

Enterprise architecture is not a goal in itself. It supports you in achieving business goals and effective business change. Systematic methods, a consistent language, and an effective tool will help you reach these goals.

Support for enterprise architecture

BiZZdesign offers a complete and integrated approach for enterprise architecture, supported with powerful tools and training. We help you define, develop, and implement your enterprise architecture.

BiZZdesign provides several training courses on enterprise architecture, like ArchiMate and TOGAF9.

The tool Architect supports modeling, analyzing, and visualizing enterprise architecture. It integrates with the business process tool BiZZdesigner, and connects to other tools using open standards. Many organizations use Architect as their standard solution for enterprise architecture.