Assessment Details:

In this assessment, students are required to write a report. The students need to study the lectures slides and the chapters associated for the weekly lecture along with the tutorial material. The aim of this report is to assess the students' understanding of the key concepts of the topics explained from week 1 to week 10. The report will be submitted to moodle.

Report 2

FinCorp is a mid-size financial company. A couple of years ago FinCorp decided to establish a fullfledged EA practice to accommodate with the growing problems around non-transparency of its IT investments and poor business and IT alignment in general. In order to boost its EA initiative, the company decided to purchase a specialized software tool for enterprise architecture. For this purpose, its IT leaders studied the available offerings on the EA tool market, contacted most promising vendors, organized meetings with vendor representatives and listened to their presentations. As a result, FinCorp had selected and acquired a rather powerful and expensive tool for enterprise architecture from a well-known vendor. Then, the company had installed and configured the tool, established a central repository for storing architectural information and sent its architecture team to a special training supplied by the tool vendor. After the training, architects had documented most areas of the organizational IT landscape and associated business processes in the EA repository and started to update this information to keep it current. Architects were also impressed with the modeling, visualization and analytical capabilities offered by their new EA tool.

However, FinCorp's CIO is pretty skeptical towards the chosen EA tool. He believes that the company is only wasting money on the tool as it is essentially nothing more than a sophisticated repository of current state information. Furthermore, the tool is used by only 4-5 people in the entire organization (all architects), does not facilitate informed decision-making among business stakeholders in any sense and does not contribute to achieving the original objectives of the EA initiative to improve business and IT alignment.

Write a report that would be presented to FinCorp's CIO that would address the CIO concerns on the following:

1. The core concepts of data and information architecture and how the newly implemented EA is the best option for Fin Corp.

2. In your report discuss how the news installed specialized software tool for enterprise architecture would support continuity plans in the context of EA

3. In your report discuss the role of audit and compliance standards in EA and how the newly implemented software tool would facilitate informed decision-making among business stakeholders in FinCorp.

4. Discuss how the newly installed tool would contribute to achieving the original objectives of the EA initiative to improve business and IT alignment.