The Enterprise Continuum: what it is for

The Enterprise Continuum is best understood as a classification scheme rather than a place. It gives the enterprise a way to sort its assets so that people can find, discuss and re-use them.

The Enterprise Continuum is a set of methods for categorising architecture and solution artifacts, whether held inside the Architecture Repository or outside it, as they progress from generic Foundation Architectures towards Organization-Specific Architectures. The core definition also allows movement the other way: assets can be classified as they evolve from generic to specific, or from specific back to generic.

It earns its place for several reasons:

• Communication. People working at different points on the continuum often talk at cross-purposes without realising it. Knowing “where in the continuum you are” gives architects, business staff, customers and vendors a shared reference point and a consistent vocabulary.
• Re-use and return on investment. By organising re-usable assets, the continuum helps the enterprise get the most out of what it has already spent on architecture.
• Explanation. It helps articulate what the Enterprise Architecture contains, why it was designed as it was, and how.
• Context. It sets the broader context for architecture work and shows how generic solutions can be taken up and specialised to meet the particular needs of one organisation.

In its simplest form, the continuum can be pictured as a view of the repository of every architecture asset available to the enterprise: descriptions, models, building blocks, patterns and viewpoints. These assets come from two directions:

The enterprise itself decides which assets go into its repository, and the potential for re-use is a major factor in that decision.

Common trap: The Enterprise Continuum is the Architecture Repository - it is not. The continuum is a way of classifying and viewing assets; the repository is where the assets are actually stored.

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This note is one section of Ultra Transcenders OGEA-101: Enterprise Architecture Foundation, an independent study guide that explains every learning unit the exam covers, topic by topic, with comparison tables, diagrams and the common traps, plus a glossary linked to the TOGAF Standard.

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