Enterprise Architecture Overview

EA is essentially an approach to define an organisation or enterprise across different domains using a structured method. The structured method defined by EA will allow an organisation to describe the following aspects of the organisation:

The organisation’s mission, objectives and strategies.
The business processes that achieve the mission and strategies.
The associates or people that perform the business processes.
The technologies that enable and support the processes.
The interconnections between the systems.


EA is primarily driven by a continuously increasing adoption of technology in the organisation resulting in greater integration and collaboration amongst business entities. EA is adopted as a practice to strategically define and align organisation’s business and IT capabilities through understanding, reconciling and planning activities. By understanding the strategies and alignment, an organisation can focus on architecting detailed solution to describe specific application and technology implementation to support specific business needs. By developing EA practices, an organisation will be able to take stock the strengths and limitations of their existing business and technology landscape.

“Enterprise Architecture is the capture of all behaviour that goes on in an organisation; the data that is processed, who does what, where everything is, and why everything is done. In a sentence, the who, what, why, when, where, and how of the business at every level from high-level corporate goals to the code of low-level programs that implement business processes used to achieve those goals."
- The Open group -

In building EA practices in the public sector, the common objectives for embarking on this initiative are as follows:

  • Reduce the fragmentation of ICT development in the public sector agencies.
  • Improve the ability of government agencies to share information.
  • Improve the ability of external users (e.g. public) to access information held by government agencies.
  • Identify opportunities for future end-to-end service integration to achieve connected government.
  • Attain better technology planning and policy development by having a consolidated view of technology adoption in the public sector agencies