Small Business EA
For small business which have staff under 50 people, EA seems useless. These business cannot, and no need to, afford a highly-cost consulting company. However, EA still helps, only if we know how to bend it.
My father runs a shoe-wholesaling business with 30 employees. It's not a big company, but there were some problems which had severely persecute him for decades. Like most traditional business in Taiwan, our family business used to do accounting and logistics by human labor. We had computer software, but it couldn't be applied to anything except calculation. Things had been fine at the first few years, but became more and more complicated as the branches built up.
My father gradually set three branches located in northern, central, and southern Taiwan. When there was only one company, he could totally control everything in it; but there was three then, and the managers he assigned couldn't do their job well. Accounting and logistic problems started emerging. Shoes which were sent out from the warehouses were not as same as shoes which were sent into the warehouses, some accounts receivable was not received on time, or never received. Even all three branches were making money, it still couldn't make up these problems.
My father put lots of time and effort, running through the three branches, trying to keep every place worked well. However, after several extremely exhausting but vain-working years, he stopped trying, and started to treat the problems as "rational loss."
But actually, he has never been quit. Three years ago, he heard from a friend that his friend's company has a software that could combine accounting with logistic, warehouse management, tax reporting and other fields. The most important thing is that we can afford it. He immediately turned to find help from the company who sold the software. It was a small company too. The software might not be strong or high-performing, but was enough for small business like ours. After listened what the software could do, my father decided to start replacing the old business model.
Then came the most painful time. We paid numerous time, staying up sitting in front of the desk, staring at accounting books of the past decade, trying to figure out a effective model to combine our way of doing business with the accounting system. It totally took us a half year to organize ourselves and to get ready for using the software.
However, after the software implementation, what we paid got a good profit. The accounts became more clear. No more missing shoes. We could easily check what we had in the warehouses of three branches, and transfer them to the customers faster than ever. Especially for tax reporting, the new business model saved us a lot of times on cumbersome reporting process.
Of course, the software didn't fix all the problems. Our major customers were retailers in markets and street vendors. We usually trade in cash rather than cheques. That made us hard to set a strict rule on billing and collecting debt, so the accounts are still not clear. However, the situation has been improved a lot.
Enterprise architecture is not only for large organization, but also for small company or specific department. During the EA process, a business can get more clear about itself, both advantage and disadvantage, and trying to improve itself.
There are many different EA frameworks in use today. Here is a collection of frameworks and their application in different area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_architecture_framework#Types_of_enterprise_architecture_framework
Among these frameworks, The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is one of the most popular one. It is based on the Technical Architecture Framework for Information Management (TAFIM). The US Department of Defense gave The Open Group explicit permission and encouragement to create TOGAF by building on the TAFIM. It took many years of development effort and many millions of dollars of US Government investment.
There are some details in the IBM developer Works, "Understand The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and IT architecture in today's world."
Even TOGAF is a famous one, it is not suitable for every company. Enterprise architectures differ from case to case. Every company has its own business model, such as process model, organizational chart, and has it's own technical model, such as systems architectures, data models, state diagrams. It's impossible to apply just one architecture to all business.
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