A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture

Indispensable technical, process, and business insight from leading enterprise architects

Many organizations today face the challenge of designing, building, and maintaining large-scale distributed enterprise systems that are able to adapt to changing business needs. Many repeat the mistakes of others, resulting in cost overruns, blown deadlines, and lost opportunity. Today's business climate places additional burden on IT to deliver. Ever-adapting business drivers can diverge from the capabilities of the enterprise IT systems today, especially if the systems are complex, fragile, and intolerant of change. Enterprise architecture can help future-proof IT investments made today.

A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture helps readers create adaptive architecture strategies for successfully implementing enterprise architectures. This classic handbook goes beyond theory and presents strategies that are based on experiences within organizations across multiple industry verticals. Behind each opinion, technique, and principle is a wealth of knowledge provided by some of the best-known industry thought leaders today.

This book's authors have architected industrial-strength software and infrastructure for many of the world's leading firms-in financial services, telecommunications, media, and e-business. They present practical guidance, candid assessments of existing practice, and detailed examples fromtheir own experience. Coverage includes: Strategies for enterprise architecture-which ones work and whyProven "product line" practices for streamlining the design of enterprise softwareUnderstanding how to translate key business drivers into enterprise architecture outputAgile architectural and modeling techniques-presented by their creator, Scott AmblerArchitecting presentation tiers, user experience, and usability methods to create a reusable base of core assetsOvercoming the challenges of transitioning to agile methodsIdentifying architecture enabling human resource practices

Whether you're a working architect or plan to become one, A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture will be your timely, trusted advisor-today and for years to come.