Examice

Your role is that of the Lead Enterprise Architect at a multinational automotive corporation. The company is headquartered in Germany, and manufactures cars, trucks and buses. It has manufacturing plants across North America, South America, Europe and Asia. Each of these plants has been operating its own planning and production scheduling systems, as well as custom developed applications that drive the automated production equipment at each plant.

The company has an ongoing initiative to improve the efficiency of all of its production operations, and in particular to reduce its carbon footprint. During a recent exercise held for internal quality improvement, it was determined that a significant reduction in energy usage could be achieved by replacing the current planning and scheduling systems with a common Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system located in one central data center. This central system would provide support to each of the plants replacing the functionality in the existing systems. It would also eliminate the need for full data centers at each of the plant facilities.

The Enterprise Architecture department has been operating for several years and has mature, well-developed architecture governance and development processes that are based on the TOGAF standard. At a recent meeting, the Architecture Board approved a Request for Architecture Work sponsored by the global

CIO. The request covered the initial architectural investigations and the development of a comprehensive architecture to plan the transformation.

You have been asked to select the most appropriate recommendation to ensure that the team evaluated different approaches to the problem and clarifies the requirements for the architecture.

Based on the TOGAF standard, which of the following is the best answer?

The team should identify the individuals and groups within the organization who will contribute to the project, in order to understand who has concerns about the initiative. The team should then hold a series of interviews at each of the manufacturing plants using the business scenario technique. This will then enable them to identify and document the key high-level stakeholder requirements for the architecture.

The team should exercise due diligence and carefully research vendor literature and conduct a series of briefings with vendors that are on the current approved supplier list. Based on the findings from the research, the team should define a preliminary Architecture Vison. The team should then use that model to build concerns among the key stakeholders.

The team should perform a shallow architecture development iteration, developing Baseline and Target Architectures for each of the manufacturing plants. This should include development of a set of views corresponding to selected viewpoints that address key concerns of the stakeholders. A consolidated gap analysis between the architectures will then be used to validate the approach, and determine the capability increments needed to achieve the target state.

The team should utilize its approved supplier list, and conduct a pilot project that will enable those suppliers to demonstrate potential solutions that will address the concerns of the stakeholders. Based on the findings of that pilot project, a complete set or requirements will be developed that will drive the evolution of the architecture.