---
# source: src/content/services/en/enterprise-architecture.md
# route:  /en/services/enterprise-architecture/
title: Enterprise Architecture
group: consulting
order: 2
tags: [architecture, strategy]
summary: Not only how the systems fit together, but stability, availability, sustainability and agility. And the processes behind them.
photoNeed: "A working session with a customer: a whiteboard with a real diagram, or two people over a laptop across a table"
stub: false
draft: false
---

## What it covers

Enterprise architecture looks at more than how the IT systems interact. It takes in
stability, availability, sustainability and agility, and alongside the technical side, the
processes that go with them, because an architecture without the workflows around it is
just a diagram.

## Why the scope grew

IT services increasingly bear directly on a company's products. A device installed at a
customer sends system data back; that gets analysed centrally, and where something looks
wrong the maintenance can be planned before anything fails.

Services like that add value to the product and are a competitive advantage. For them to be
possible at all, IT has to be involved early in product development, so that the framework
exists.

## What follows from it

An offering like that needs more than the mechanical or electronic engineering. It needs the
IT department, and usually further applications and services. It also forces a decision on
whether the collected system data is stored and processed locally or directly in a public
cloud.

That decision is not purely technical. It hangs on data protection, on the contracts with
end customers, and on who may analyse the data later.