Implementation of Enterprise Architecture at Austin Energy

In a large organization like Austin Energy with up to 20 Business Units (BUs), it is difficult to have a centralized repository of all the systems and applications that the BUs use. It is essential for the Enterprise Architects to have this knowledge for planning the Technology Roadmaps(TR) of the organization. Enterprise architecture is a well-defined practice for conducting enterprise analysis, design, planning, and implementation, using a comprehensive approach at all times, for the successful development and execution of strategy. Enterprise architecture applies architecture principles and practices to guide organizations through the business, information, process, and technology changes necessary to execute their strategies. These practices utilize the various aspects of an enterprise to identify, motivate, and achieve these changes. Enterprise Architecture phase II at Austin Energy, the project that I worked in, aims at putting together all these information, system integrations and projects planned that impact the TR. A SharePoint site was utilized to build this repository. Modeling the data and its standardization and normalization required a great deal of effort to make it adaptable by all the BUs. I interviewed several employees to gather information on integration and created integration diagrams using Visio. I developed a dashboard to track the progress of the data collected so far and its quality. The dashboard shows that there is not sufficient knowledge about a few critical departments that I aim to work on in the coming weeks. As we are progressing towards the end of this phase, we are identifying data model issues and a lack of taxonomy that needs to be addressed as we face them.