Enterprise Architecture Series:

Overview

The Institute for Software Research, Executive and Professional Education, offers training courses in the domain of Enterprise Architecture (EA).

The Clinger-Cohen Act and other public initiatives, and private sector forces including globalization, have clarified the need for systematic attention to enterprise architecture. Enterprise architects have the responsibility to help their organization to integrate strategic, business, and technology planning; to improve mission performance; to achieve competitive advantage; and to realize their other organizational goals. These considerations are addressed through ISRI's standards for EA Knowledge and Skills (KSAs), that identify what enterprise architects need to know to do their jobs at various levels of the organization. Click the following link to download the top level of ISRI's EA-KSA List.

Download KSA List

Each course contains an exit examination covering the relevant knowledge and skill areas, and a certificate for "Certified Enterprise Architect" (CEA) is awarded for the completion of the entire series.

Through the courses, students learn the concepts of Enterprise Architecture including major EA frameworks, program establishment, implementation methods, documentation products, and maturity measurement. The courses review the history and major approaches to EA including the Zachman EA Framework, Spewak's EA Planning Method, U.S. Federal EA Framework, FEA Reference Models, OMB's EA Assessment Framework, GAO's EA Management Maturity Framework, and Bernard's EA3 Cube Framework.

The series includes hands-on assignments designed to produce a web-based EA repository and to populate it with common documentation products and artifacts (e.g., business activity models, data models, system models, network models).

Finally, students will explore ways to link EA repository information together to make it useful for analysis and decision-making, that is, to integrate strategic, business, and technology planning to achieve the organization's goals. And the courses include several commercial EA tool demonstrations to show how to rapidly develop and populate tool-driven EA repositories.