California Employment Development Department

Enterprise Technical Architecture Development

The Business Driven Architecture Process

 

The Employment Development Department's (EDD) success in the future depends on how well we manage administrative and business process change in response to external and internal business drivers. To position our information technology (IT) infrastructure to be adaptive and to enable business process change, the EDD IT Branch sponsored a strategic initiative to analyze our current and define our future information technology environment. This planning effort established the Business Driven Architecture (BDA) as the department's enterprise technical architecture. The BDA establishes a technology blueprint and standards framework based on:

Prior to initiating the Business Driven Architecture Project, the EDD did not have an enterprise technical architecture. There was no guiding framework to align IT with the line-of-business automation projects or to establish the technology direction and standards for IT initiatives. Consequently, the EDD was increasingly challenged to:

To address these issues the EDD initiated the BDA architecture definition process based on META Group's Enterprise Architecture Strategies (EAS) service and methodology and architecture consulting services of Grant Thornton, LLP. The architecture process provides an IT governance and technology framework that:

The BDA is broad, consisting of five information technology domains that represent a majority of the EDD's IT environment:

The attached BDA Domain Model diagram depicts these five architectural domains.

The BDA defines an IT standards framework that supports:

The enterprise architecture development process aligns future technology investments with EDD business needs. Participation of both business and IT personnel ensures that business drivers and information requirements, technology trends, and architecture principles each contribute to strengthening this alignment. The BDA technologies and standards provide a blueprint for current and future business applications development, infrastructure deployments, technology investigations and purchases. Technology advancements together with industry trends continuously affect the choices available, thus the BDA process is dynamic to ensure the technical architecture is adaptive to meet changes in business and IT. The EDD's Enterprise Architecture Team manages the architecture change process to ensure the architecture remains responsive and "evergreen."

The fully implemented Business Driven Architecture will enable the EDD to respond more quickly to business change, improve customer service, provide greater access to information and set standards for new technology integration. By bridging the gap between changing business needs and information technology capability, the Business Driven Architecture provides a shared enterprise vision for the deployment of information technology enabling EDD to work better, faster, and smarter.

 

Business Driven Architecture Contact Information:

EDD Enterprise Architecture Team
Telephone: (916)-654-9240
CALNET 8-454-9240
TPPD, Solar 2, MIC-75
800 Capitol Mall
Sacramento, CA 95814
E-mail address:
BDA@edd.ca.gov