Enterprise Architect for an Enterprise Architecture

In the last year I have done a number of projects for a Dutch government agency as a data architect. This organisation has an architecture team with four members. There is a problem in producing architecture documents like Project Start Architectures, it takes too much time and the result has limited value for the projects.  This is mainly caused by the lack of overview on the baseline and the target architecture. There is no overview of the business processes, the application and the infrastructure.

For every project, an architect has to do a lot of research on the baseline architecture first, sometimes this activity takes weeks to get a architecture view that is input for working on the target architecture. Another problem is that every architect has his own tools and techniques for the architecture notations and documents. Although there is an architecture document template, there are large differences in the quality and presentation of these documents. However due to the differences in tools and techniques, every architect starts from scratch for every project.

To tackle these problems the team decided to synchronize their activities, techniques, notation and tools. Therefore the following questions where formulated:

• Which notation is best to support our architecture documents and diagrams?
• Based on the selected notation, which tool can help us to make our documents more efficiently?
• What do we have to change in our team to encourage reuse of existing documents and diagrams?

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