This paper was written by Tim Bauer to fulfill an assignment from the University of Denver University College ICT 4010 Enterprise Architecture course taught by EAPJ founder Dr. Steve Else.
The Organization is a School District providing primary and secondary education to over 65,000 students and 6,600 employees. Current economic events and business drivers for transformation require significant reliance on technology. The strategic objectives of School Choice, World-Class Education, and System Performance require an integrated environment to enable data-driven decision making. [restrict]An Enterprise Architecture (EA) program will ensure the alignment of business and IT strategies, and result in the integration and standardization of core business pro-cesses. However, there are significant structural issues of technical debt, lack of processes, and the complexity of current legacy systems inhibit the organization to effectively change.
This document proposes an Enterprise Architecture (EA) program that supports the transformative strategic goals by providing organizational agility, business process efficiencies, and lowers overall total cost of ownership. Users are provided feature and content-rich integrated applications enabling a proactive transformation of processes, increased functionality, and a more responsive EA. The utilization of Web 2.0 technologies decrease the complexity of implementing the EA, reducing training and sustainment costs.
The EA program addresses the paradox of technical debt, system complexity, and software quality assurance. The organization needs to instantiate substantiative changes in software development processes to reduce complexity and to ensure overall quality, maintainability, and sustainability. The instantiation of modern design patterns and technology will provide the means to integrate legacy applications, reduce complexity in the enterprise environment, increase system flexibility, and reduce overall IT costs. These efforts will maximize the return on investment, ensure appropriate security mechanisms, and enable organizational transformation.
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