The New Role of Big Data in Recent Enterprise Architecture Design

摘要

These days, Enterprise Architecture is considered as one of the key projects in enterprises worldwide irrespective of size or business areas. The primary objective is to establish a robust, integrated ecosystem across the entire enterprise to make it capable of generating as much value within its different Strategic Business Units (SBUs) with maximum autonomy while continuing to be one whole and monolithic business entity. This journey starts from enterprise high-level strategic plans in addition to enterprise mission and vision and ends with matured and integrated technical blueprints in charge of materializing those goals and strategies by Information and Communications Technology (ICT) enablers. This is what is commonly called a capability model of the target architecture in a new enterprise architecture (EA) framework, such as The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). This is a widely used enterprise architecture reference framework. In the meanwhile, the newest surge towards Industry 4.0 in many business sectors makes a big transformation for enterprises by introducing new areas of focus such as cloud computing, mobility, social networks and tools, big data, Internet of Things (IoT), etc. This paper is focused on the increasing role of big data in the maturity and applicability of EA models in the new real enterprise ecosystem. TOGAF 9.2 is selected as the broadly used EA framework to make the information in this paper more tangible. Most of the facts within this paper are extracted by an EA project recently done through the contribution of authors for an Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Financing (EPCF) enterprise with several business sectors in the power, Oil & Gas (O&G), and transportation industries. As the results show, the role of big data is non-negotiable at and has a strong impact on the capability model of the enterprise in generating value from different areas.