Examice

Scenario:

You are serving as the Chief Architect for a large, global commodities trading company which has been growing rapidly through a series of acquisitions. Each business is performing well in its markets. However, the lack of integration between headquarters and the business units has increasingly caused problems in the handling of customer and financial information. The inability to share information across businesses has resulted in lost opportunities to "leverage the synergies" that had been intended when the businesses were acquired. At present, each business unit maintains its own applications. Despite an earlier initiative to install a common application to manage customer, products, supplier, and inventory information, each business unit has different ways of defining each of these core elements and has customized the common application to the point where the ability to exchange information is difficult, costly, and error-prone. As a result, the company has made the decision to introduce a single enterprise-wide application to consolidate information from several applications that exist across the lines of business. The application will be used by all business units and accessed by suppliers through well defined interfaces.

As part of the process for establishing the Enterprise Architecture department, you are developing a set of architecture principles to guide the activities. You need to specify the best approach for this work. Based on TOGAF 9, which of the following is the best answer?

You gather information from credible industry sources in the commodities business. Based on that, you assess current trends and apply that to defining a set of principles that embody best practices. You select architecture principles that do not conflict with each other and that should be stable. You ensure that all the principles are realistic and avoid including principles that are obvious.

You examine the mission statements for the company and each of its businesses, together with the corporate value statements. Based on that, you define a set of principles and review with the CIO. When developing the principles you ensure that they actively promote the alignment of IT with the business strategies and initiatives of the company. You then seek the endorsement of the CIO and senior management.

You define a set of principles that support the preferred best practices embodied in the Enterprise Architecture department charter. You publish the principles on the corporate intranet to ensure widespread acceptance and compliance. You then schedule regular periodic Compliance Assessments with individual business units to check that they have made satisfactory progress toward meeting the objectives and conditions embodied in the principles.

You examine the mission statements for the company and each of its businesses, together with the corporate value statements. Based on that, you work with the Architecture Board to define the principles. When developing the principles you ensure that they actively promote the alignment of IT with the corporate business strategies. You then hold a series of review meetings with all the relevant stakeholders, including senior management, ensuring their support.