The Best Enterprise Architecture Books of All Time

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a set of descriptions relevant to both business and IT intended to bridge the communication gap between business and IT stakeholders in organizations, facilitate information systems planning and improve business and IT alignment. Due to complex historical reasons, the notion of enterprise architecture was always surrounded by endless speculations, dangerous myths, non-existing best practices, unfulfilled promises, expensive failures and grave disappointments. Traditionally the entire discourse around enterprise architecture was dominated by shallow advice and faddish approaches (e.g.

well-known EA frameworks) infinitely distant from the practical realities, but nonetheless aggressively promoted by commercially motivated consultancies and gurus. At the same time, realistic and trustworthy information on enterprise architecture is still incredibly hard to find in any available sources. Based on an extensive study of the actual industry best practices and existing EA literature, this book provides a unique, systematic, end-to-end description of various aspects of an EA practice integrated into a consistent logical picture. In particular, this book offers clear, research-based, conceptually sound and practically actionable answers to the key questions related to enterprise architecture:. What is the meaning of enterprise architecture and an EA practice?What processes constitute established EA practices and how do they work?What EA artifacts are used in successful EA practices and how?What is the best way to structure architecture roles and functions?What software tools and modeling languages are necessary for enterprise architecture?How to initiate an EA practice in organizations from scratch and evolve it?Where do current EA best practices originate from?This book is organized in a highly structured, sequential manner and does not require any prior knowledge of enterprise architecture. The book is intended for a broad audience of people interested in enterprise architecture including practicing and aspiring architects, architecture managers, academic EA researchers, EA lecturers and students in universities.

Mastering ArchiMate Edition 3.1 is the fourth edition of a much praised book about the ArchiMate(R) Enterprise Architecture Modeling Language, which is a standard and a Registered Trade Mark of The Open Group. The book gives an introduction to the language, then goes on to show you key aspects of successful modeling, and many different patterns for its use. From Business to Infrastructure, from Risk & Security to Application Exploitation and Maintenance. While the aim of the book is to teach the language, it often also offers necessary background, so that the patterns can make sense to the reader not familiar with a subject.

Thus, it also contains introductions to subjects such as virtualization, bitcoin/blockchain, infrastructure as code, processes versus functions, SOA/API, ESB, Terminal Services, etc. It also contains a short introduction to BPMN(TM) in order to describe a linking of both major languages. Forewords by Marc Lankhorst and Jean-Baptiste Sarrodie. Gerben Wierda (1961) is author of Chess and the Art of Enterprise Architecture, and is Lead Architect at APG, one of the largest Fiduciary Managers in the world. Before, he was Lead Architect of the Judiciary of The Netherlands, and Lead Architect of APG Asset Management. He has overseen the construction of one of the largest single ArchiMate models in the world to date. He holds an M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Groningen and an MBA from RSM Erasmus, Rotterdam.

Lankhorst and his co‑authors present ArchiMate® 3.0, enterprise modelling language that captures the complexity of architectural domains and their relations and allows the construction of integrated enterprise architecture models. They provide architects with concrete instruments that improve their architectural practice. As this is not enough, they additionally present techniques and heuristics for communicating with all relevant stakeholders about these architectures.

Since an architecture model is useful not only for providing insight into the current or future situation but can also be used to evaluate the transition from ‘as‑is’ to ‘to‑be’, the authors also describe analysis methods for assessing both the qualitative impact of changes to an architecture and the quantitative aspects of architectures, such as performance and cost issues. The modelling language presented has been proven in practice in many real‑life case studies and has been adopted by The Open Group as an international standard. So this book is an ideal companion for enterprise IT or business architects in industry as well as for computer or management science students studying the field of enterprise architecture. This fourth edition of the book has been completely reworked to be compatible with ArchiMate® 3.0, and it includes a new chapter relating this new version to other standards. New sections on capability analysis, risk analysis, and business architecture in general have also been introduced.