Int'l Conf. e-Learning, e-Bus., EIS, and e-Gov.
| EEE'18 |
The New Role of Big Data in Recent Enterprise Architecture Design
Shahriar Movafaghi
Computer Information Technology
Southern New Hampshire University
Manchester, USA
s.movafaghi@snhu.edu
Abstract— These days, Enterprise
Architecture is considered as one of the key
projects in enterprises worldwide irrespective of
size or business areas. The primary objective is
to establish a robust, integrated ecosystem across
the entire enterprise to make it capable of
generating as much value within its different
Strategic Business Units (SBUs) with maximum
autonomy while continuing to be one whole and
monolithic business entity. This journey starts
from enterprise high-level strategic plans in
addition to enterprise mission and vision and
ends with matured and integrated technical
blueprints in charge of materializing those goals
and strategies by Information and
Communications Technology (ICT) enablers.
This is what is commonly called a capability
model of the target architecture in a new
enterprise architecture (EA) framework, such as
The Open Group Architecture Framework
(TOGAF). This is a widely used enterprise
architecture reference framework. In the
meanwhile, the newest surge towards Industry
4.0 in many business sectors makes a big
transformation for enterprises by introducing
new areas of focus such as cloud computing,
mobility, social networks and tools, big data,
Internet of Things (IoT), etc. This paper is
focused on the increasing role of big data in the
maturity and applicability of EA models in the
new real enterprise ecosystem. TOGAF 9.2 is
selected as the broadly used EA framework to
make the information in this paper more
tangible. Most of the facts within this paper are
extracted by an EA project recently done
through the contribution of authors for an
Engineering, Procurement, Construction and
ISBN: 1-60132-474-X, CSREA Press ©
143
Ramin Nassiri
Dept. of Computer Eng., Islamic Azad University,
Central Tehran Branch
Tehran, Iran
r_nasiri@iauctb.ac.ir
Financing (EPCF) enterprise with several
business sectors in the power, Oil & Gas (O&G),
and transportation industries. As the results
show, the role of big data is non-negotiable at
and has a strong impact on the capability model
of the enterprise in generating value from
different areas.
Keywords— Big Data, Capability Model, Cloud
Computing, Enterprise Architecture, Industry 4.0,
IoT, SBU, TOGAF.
I. INTRODUCTION
No enterprise can survive solely relying on the
business concern without considering the
technologies which must be employed to make it
capable of having a real and successful performance.
The impact of this close collaboration has been so
substantial that we are observing a significant and
radical transformation in most businesses from their
traditional form toward E-Business, which in turn
gives birth to many new concepts, items,
considerations and sometimes threats. While this
transformation is a must and irrevocable in most
cases, it can cause a disruption in the business
environment because of the inherent differences
between business concerns and technology
concerns. Rapid evolutionary waves of
technologies usually bring shock to the business and
is a driving force of change despite the resistance of
business to change. Enterprise architecture is a
significant endeavor to conquer this significant
problem by creating an architecture that protects
nearly all of the enterprise values and principles but
also employs adequate technologies needed in a
tight collaborative layered model which usually
starts with the first levels of business goals, such as
enterprise mission, vision, strategies, and objectives,
144
etc., and ends with technology solutions such as
applications, services, telecommunication
infrastructures, storage media, etc. that cross every
different layer. This is done so that tight integration
of the enterprise business value with technology is
not broken. It is achieved through the use of the high
engineering disciplines that exist in an EA
framework. In recent decades, a few reference
enterprise architecture frameworks have been
introduced [1] [2], with TOGAF [3] [4] and the
Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF)
[5] among the most used.
ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE
II.
As formally published by Open Group, TOGAF,
four architecture domains are commonly accepted
as subsets of an overall Enterprise Architecture, all
of which the TOGAF standard is designed to
support. They include the following:
x Business Architecture defines business
strategy, governance, organization, and
critical business processes and services.
x Data Architecture describes the structure of
an organization's logical and physical data
assets and data management resources.
Fig. 1 Typical Capability Hierarchy in TOGAF Enterprise Architecture Framework
ISBN: 1-60132-474-X, CSREA Press ©
Int'l Conf. e-Learning, e-Bus., EIS, and e-Gov. | EEE'18 |
x Application Architecture provides a
blueprint for the individual applications to
be deployed, their interactions, and their
relationships to the core business processes
of the organization.
x Technology Architecture describes the
logical software and hardware capabilities
that are required to support the deployment
of business, data, and application services;
this includes IT infrastructure, middleware,
networks, communications, processing,
standards, etc.
The endeavor starts with building the enterprise
baseline architecture and then paving the road
toward the design of target architecture. Detailed
blueprints are required to create a technology map
to get to the capability model, which is capable of
generating value. One of the most important
aspects of enterprise architecture is the capability
model (Fig. 1)
The capability model is considered the initial
building block which ends with enterprise
competency, as the prerequisite for a competitive
enterprise advantage (Fig. 2) [6].
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Fig.2. Enterprise Advantage Building Blocks

industry giants like Siemens were counted as

III. INDUSTRY 4.0
The term "Industry/Industrie 4.0" which is
commonly referred to as the 4th Industrial
revolution originated from a project in high-tech
strategy in Germany and finalized on April 2013 at
the Hannover Fair, where the final report of the
Working Group Industry 4.0 was presented. Many
pioneers of this emerging Mega-trend. The
philosophy of this mega-trend is making cyber-
physical systems communicate and cooperate with
each other and also with humans in real-time both
internally and across organizational services offered
and used by participants of the value chain (Fig. 3).

Fig 3. The Industry Revolution Roadmap

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146 Int'l Conf. e-Learning, e-Bus., EIS, and e-Gov. | EEE'18 |

volumes of complicated data. One of the

The new wave of Industry 4.0 encompasses a
few areas such as:
ƒ Industrial IoT (IIoT)
ƒ Digital Twin
ƒ Big Data
ƒ Mobile devices
ƒ Cloud
ƒ Augmented reality/Virtual reality
ƒ Robotics
ƒ Social network processing/collaboration
ƒ Etc.
Since data architecture is the central part of an
EA blueprint, then the role of big data would be
bold and impressive and subject of particular
focus.
IV. BIG DATA
Big data, by definition, is data sets that are so
voluminous and complex that most of the time it
is impossible, or not cost-effective, for traditional
data-processing applications to deal with them.
This is valid for capturing, storage, locate,
communication and further processing of vast
significant challenges with big data is that while
being processed by unstructured database systems,
the data may escape from being bound by
ACIDity (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation,
Durability) theory of structured database systems.
The following unstructured database systems
mostly are CAP (Consistent, Availability,
Partition Tolerance) based. The CAP Theorem
brings many issues that need to be addressed by
new projects for application developers, according
to this theorem. Only two out of three features of
CAP can be achieved each time. This means that
the developer must make an important decision as
to which two parts of the CAP Theorem should be
selected in each case.
There are also some concepts associated with
big data, among them the concepts of volume,
variety, and velocity. Every minute a massive
volume of data is captured, processed, transferred
and stored. The value generated by this data is not
negotiable at all, so dealing with big data is now a
must not a choice. The Fig. 5 shows an accurate
schema of big data decomposition while being
deployed for various business sectors [7].

Consistency

Partition Tolerance
Availability

Fig. 4 The CAP Theorem

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Int'l Conf. e-Learning, e-Bus., EIS, and e-Gov. | EEE'18 | 147

Fig. 5 Big Data 6V decomposition Schema

Fig. 5 Big Data 6V decomposition Schema

Fig. 6 High-Level Capability Model (incomplete) of the Target Company

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V. CONVERGENCE OF ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE
AND BIG DATA
The primary objective of migrating the
enterprise from a baseline EA to a target EA is
sufficient confidence that the enterprise can
generate value to its, as expected in circumstances
where the customer is the priority [8] [9]. The
capability model in TOGAF is considered as a
reliable technique to model the AS-IS and Target
Capability of the enterprise. Figure 6 is
illuminating a partial capability model (high level)
for our target company doing business in a variety
of sectors such as power and O&G. From an
industry observer’s viewpoint, big data plays an
essential role in most of the components of the
model. The colors in Figure 6 are based on heat-
chart [10], the green means currently available,
yellow means current available but needs minor
modification or development, and red means not
available or subject of radical change.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
technology is generating gigabytes of data daily
which results in terabytes each month. The Digital
Twin mega-trend recently introduced by industrial
giants such as GE and Siemens has a high impact
on generating an amount of data for each device.
Only a drilling device in the O&G sector would
generate more than 200 Gigabytes of data during
its lifetime, all of which should be captured and
stored for future use of capabilities, such as claims
management. A traditional structured database
such as Oracle 11G could be employed for these
new circumstances [11]. That is the reason that
the company was forced to add new entities, such
as Hadoop and Cassandra, to its data processing
Ecosystem to handle this data. This is a change
from the time when most companies invested
heavily in specialized hardware. Enterprise
architects were traditionally responsible for
maintaining a technology ecosystem that was
vendor-dependent and reliant on one technology.
The next impact of this phenomenon in on the
technology layer in TOGAF which requires
stronger infrastructure both from the Scale-up and
Scale-out perspectives. The former centralized
environment has to be changed to a parallel and
ISBN: 1-60132-474-X, CSREA Press ©
Int'l Conf. e-Learning, e-Bus., EIS, and e-Gov. | EEE'18 |
distributed environment mainly on cloud-based
environments (either a public or private cloud)
[12].
VI. CONCLUSION
The new information technology era and the
underlying technologies have a substantial impact
on most of the aspects of life and business.
Technology has proven itself to be a vital part of
nearly every business and is keeping aligned with
business goals and strategies. It is now
considered as a high prioritized Critical Success
Factor (CSF) for businesses. Enterprise architects
are experts who should play a significant role in
achieving this critical objective. One of the main
obstacles to their success is a new life, and non-
stop interaction between machines and humans
which are continuously are generating valuable
data that cannot be ignored and must be captured,
stored and processed. This requires a new
paradigm for data architecture and management.
Big data is invented to address this issue. This
means that enterprise architects have to take the
big data paradigm and position it in all the
enterprise architecture models they create from
the business layer to the technology layer as
predefined by most of EA, such as TOGAF. In
this paper, we emphasize the reality and necessity
of this new environment in a live enterprise
architecture project done for a big corporation
engaged in different industrial sectors such as
power and oil and gas.
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