Developing a project architecture and evaluating the Enterprise Architecture initiative at Tata Steel

Abstract

Organizations have become more aware of Enterprise Architecture and the need to work under architecture. Tata Steel assumes that Enterprise Architecture can help them realizing the benefits that come from working with Enterprise Architecture as presented in literature. This thesis consists out of two parts. The first part is about the process of developing a business and application architecture, and the development of the architecture itself. An ‘as-is’ project architecture, which represents the system landscape and business processes at the start of the project, and a ‘to-be’ project architecture, which represents how the system landscape and business processes should look when the project finishes, was developed. The goal of the project for which the architecture was developed is to change the system landscape in such a way that it can support the newly developed distribution model. The second part of the thesis focuses on research questions about Enterprise Architecture. The most important goal of this thesis is to describe how Enterprise Architecture can be implemented in an organization like Tata Steel. The Enterprise Architecture approach that Tata has chosen is described, evaluated and improvements are suggested. The governance of architectural models is discussed and the value of architecture is discussed. All while using the experience gotten from creating the ‘as-is’ and ‘to-be’ project architectures.