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?