Enterprise architecture is a management practice that was initially developed within the IT discipline to manage the complexity of IT systems, as well as the ongoing change constantly triggered by business and technology developments.
Today, one of the primary reasons EA is adopted in organizations worldwide is to promote alignment between business requirements and IT solutions. EA is expanding into other business disciplines, as well: to enable business strategy development, improve business efficiency, facilitate knowledge management and assist with organizational learning, to name a few.
In order to effectively implement EA in organizations, architects are increasingly looking for best practices and frameworks to assist them. One of the few architecture frameworks publicly available to guide architects in their implementation is TOGAF. Put simply, TOGAF is a comprehensive toolset for assisting in the acceptance, production, use and maintenance of enterprise architectures. It is based on an iterative process model supported by best practices and a reusable set of existing architectural assets. Since it was developed by members of The Open Group Architecture Forum more than 10 years ago, TOGAF has emerged as arguably the de facto standard framework for delivering enterprise architecture.
It is from this operational asymmetry that complexity in event processing is required. In other words, as distributed networks grow in complexity, it is difficult to determine causal dependence when trying to diagnosis a distributed networked system. Most who work in a large distributed network ecosystem (cyberspace) understand this. The CEP notion of “the event cloud” was an attempt to express this complexity and uncertainly (in cyberspace).
Some definitions key on the question of the probability of encountering a given condition of a system once characteristics of the system are specified. Warren Weaver has posited that the complexity of a particular system is the degree of difficulty in predicting the properties of the system if the properties of the system’s parts are given. In Weaver’s view, complexity comes in two forms: disorganized complexity, and organized complexity. [2] Weaver’s paper has influenced contemporary thinking about complexity. [3]