Coherency Management: Using Enterprise Architecture for Alignment, Agility, and Assurance

This paper represents a significant point of evolution in thought and practice about the design andmanagement of complex enterprises that often exist inhighly dynamic, sometimes chaoticoperating environments. The paper asserts that Coherency Management is the primary outcome goal of Enterprise Architecture (EA); that the architecture of enterprises should be formalized and promote coherency; and the best way to do this is to adopt EA as the ongoing, overarching method for abstracting, analyzing, designing, and re-engineering new and existing enterprises – regardless of the market, industry, or government sector that the enterprise belongs to. EA is about more than technology as it now has strategic and business dimensions – all of which must align to create agility and assurance in promoting transformation and delivering value. The paper discusses three modes of EA, namely Foundation Architecture, Extended Architecture and Embedded Architecture, that represent progression in thought and practice, with emphasis that the modes are independent but not necessarily mutually exclusive. The paper also discusses how collectively these influence enterprise coherency. The paper concludes by elaborating the ways and approaches to assess organizational coherence.