An Introduction to User-Centric Enterprise Architecture

InfoManagement Direct, May 2, 2008

Andrew Blumenthal

When it’s time to make order out of an often-chaotic environment with hundreds or even thousands of systems in use, IT professionals turn to enterprise architecture (EA), the discipline that synthesizes key business and technical information across the organization to support better decision-making.

User-centric EA represents a new and improved way of practicing this discipline. It extends and expands the goal of traditional EA by providing useful and usable information products and governance services to the end user. In user-centric EA, information is relevant (current, accurate and complete), easy to understand and readily accessible. Also, in user-centric EA, decision-making is improved on behalf of all stakeholders in the organization, not just the IT function.

I developed user-centric EA first at the Secret Service and later at the Coast Guard. Here’s how I did it.

The Origin of User-Centric EA

I have been an enterprise architect with the federal government since 2000; I was there shortly after the Department of Homeland Security was formed and had the opportunity to participate in the development of architecture products for the new department at that time. And I remember seeing architecture products that spanned the length and height of entire conference rooms: Many of us at that time used to joke that we would defy anyone in the room to make sense of what these information artifacts said or meant.

So my first decision when I became chief enterprise architect at the U.S. Secret Service was that I would not develop any EA information products that did not have a clear use and a defined user. If nobody wanted it, we weren’t going to spend time developing it, regardless of what any framework told us to do.

This is not to say that user-centric EA breaks completely with the discipline. In fact, it is based on the other common frameworks such as the Zachman Framework, the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA), the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DODAF), and the Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). But it diverges in its unequivocal focus on developing useful and usable products to the end user.

EA User Requirements - Getting Started

As we prepare to work with the users, we have a user-centric framework for capturing, viewing and processing information.

A Framework for Capturing Information

Before we ever identify a single user need or requirement, we use a simple, basic framework for all of the information products that we will provide the users. This is known as the EA framework and has six perspectives through which one can look at business and IT information. It is relatively common to all enterprise architectures:

• Performance: The results of operations or outcomes that we are trying to achieve (EA is a proponent of the development and tracking of performance metrics).
• Business: The functions, processes, activities and tasks to produce those outcomes (EA is striving for business-technology alignment).
• Information: The information required to perform mission-business functions (EA is driving toward information sharing and accessibility).
• Services: The systems that serve up the requisite information to the business (EA is working for interoperability and component reuse). 

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