Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles

Enterprise Architecture Justification Paper
Case Study

Written by:
June 14, 2000
IFSM 311
Professor

To consider what enterprise architecture means, it is important to understand its origin. All architecture within information technology can track its ancestry back to the lessons learned from building architecture. Enterprise Architecture is the description and visualization of the structure, a blueprint if you will, of a given area of contemplation, its elements and their collaborations and interrelations links vision, strategy and feasibility, focusing on usability durability and effectiveness. Architecture enables construction, defining principles, rules, standards and guidelines, expressing and communicating a vision. This model will help any organization understand a proposed change in services or equipment it be integrated or changed within their environment.
Enterprise architecture is designed to determine how an organization can achieve its current and future objectives in an efficient and effective manner. The architecture is separated into the business, application, and information viewpoints. The business viewpoint identifies the processes and standards that the business functions with every day. The application viewpoint describes the collaboration between different processes and standards used by the organization. The information viewpoint describes and assembles the raw data in the organization such as presentations, databases, and spreadsheets that an organization needs to efficiently operate. The technology viewpoint describes the hardware, software, programming and networking systems that is used by an organization.
There are several advantages using the Enterprise architecture model. First, it greatly improves the decision making process while easing the stress of changing demands and