---
# source: src/content/services/en/enterprise-architecture.md
# route:  /en/services/enterprise-architecture/
title: Enterprise Architecture
group: consulting
audience: [enterprise, provider]
order: 2
tags: [architecture, strategy]
summary: Not only how the systems fit together, but stability, availability, sustainability and agility. And the processes behind them.
photoNeed: "A working session with a customer: a whiteboard with a real diagram, or two people over a laptop across a table"
stub: false
draft: false
---

## What it covers

Enterprise architecture covers how the IT systems interact, their stability, availability,
sustainability and agility, and the processes that go with them.

## What comes out of it

A big picture of your IT landscape and your IT services, and from it a roadmap: where
applications and systems get consolidated, where the interface between application and
process has to improve, and which operating model fits, on premises, hybrid or in the public
cloud. Requirements, constraints, assumptions and risks are documented, following a design
methodology we have used for years.

## Why the scope grew

IT services increasingly bear directly on a company's products. A device installed at a
customer sends system data back; that gets analysed centrally, and where something looks
wrong the maintenance can be planned before anything fails.

Services like that add value to the product and are a competitive advantage. For them to be
possible at all, IT has to be involved early in product development, so that the framework
exists.

## What follows from it

An offering like that needs more than the mechanical or electronic engineering. It needs the
IT department, and usually further applications and services. It also forces a decision on
whether the collected system data is stored and processed locally or directly in a public
cloud.

That decision is not purely technical. It hangs on data protection, on the contracts with
end customers, and on who may analyse the data later.