What is an Enterprise Architecture Principle?
Architecture principles are brief statements that identify your organization's enduring priorities. They explain how to approach a problem and decision.
Enterprise architecture principles provide the base guidance for decision making. They are an architecture governance tool. Use them to capture top-level architecture decisions.
Architecture principles express your strategy, goals, and value proposition. They help us make better aligned decisions.
We refer to enterprise architecture principles as guidelines and guard posts. Or even the North Star. All these phrases are saying the same thing - basic guidance and direction.
Value of Enterprise Architecture Principles
Use them to test potential choices and speed up good decision making. Use them to avoid the trap of fake alignment. Rather than claims of alignment, we want decisions that consistently move towards the strategic goals and priorities.
We use architecture principles to:
- Enable Decision-Making—set precedence during trade-off discussions and tie-breaking
- Align the Enterprise—drive objective critical conversations that are aligned to enterprise goals and priorities
- Express Values and Culture—provide a better understanding of your enterprise’s culture and values
- Improve Architecture Governance—use principles to monitor and test decisions and approach
7 Enterprise Architecture Principles
We see these used again and again by successful Enterprise Architecture Teams.
They form a core. They challenge our assumptions about what we need.
Use these principles to question your assumptions and create a custom architecture principles for your company.
- Don’t Mess With Success
- Statement: We have a successful organization. We will use our best-in-house methods as the foundation for standardization and improvement.
- Focus On Excellence
- Statement: We will focus effort on processes and capabilities that enable us to differentiate from our competitors and excel in execution. All systems and process design will align with differentiation and excellence.
- Why Not One?
- Statement: We assume One. One standard process; one standard KPI; one reliable source of information; one software tool. Whomever wants variation must show the differentiation and excellence delivered justify the complexity, customization, variability and ongoing cost to operations and IT.
- Data is an Asset
- Statement: All data is a concrete, valuable asset to an enterprise. It is a real, measurable resource.
We will apply standard asset management practices to data:- Someone will be responsible for the asset
- We will make the asset available for use to the maximum benefit of the company
- We will maintain the asset and at the end of its useful life, we will dispose of it.
- We will protect the asset from loss or damage
- Statement: All data is a concrete, valuable asset to an enterprise. It is a real, measurable resource.
- Systems Work Where We Work
- Statement: We performed our business in many locations—our offices, our customer’s worksite, our employees' and partners' homes, and on the road. Software and processes must work reliably, safely, and efficiently where we work.
- Painless User Experience
- Statement: Our systems and processes exist to improve our operational efficiency and enable us to differentiate in our customer's eyes. Staff, partners, and customers who use our systems deserve a painless user experience. The experience needs to consume no more time or difficulty than possible.
- Self-Service
- Statement: Staff, partners, and customers should be able to serve themselves. Systems and processes need to be optimized to eliminate training and administrative overhead.
Using Architecture Principles in Architecture Development
See how these principles are used in Architecture Development:
IT Architecture Principles
Besides your Enterprise Architecture Principles, it is common to have domain specific architecture principles.
Like the broader enterprise principles these are high-level guidelines that constrain the development of the architecture in a domain.
IT Architecture principles are specific to the IT Architecture domain. They must align to your enterprise architecture principles.
These are the principles that you should follow when designing your new IT Architecture to solve the problems created in the past.
- Simplicity
- Flexibility
- Modularity
- Redundancy
- Scalability
How many Architecture Principles Should You Have?
You should have 10-15 architecture principles in your enterprise architecture.
More will over constraining your architecture development. remember, avoid limiting the freedom and creativity of your architects and implementers.
With too few, you are not providing sufficient guidance. Your enterprise architects and implementers have to perform extra analysis to have confidence they are aligning with your strategy, goals, and value proposition.
