Enterprise Architecture
Five years on, DabbaGo runs three businesses: lunch tiffins, grocery delivery and event catering. A loyal customer who uses all three has three accounts, three passwords and three addresses on file. Marketing cannot tell that she is one person. Each team built what it needed, and each choice made sense locally. Together they make a mess that no single team can see, let alone fix.
The rule
See every system at once; steer them toward where the business goes.
Enterprise architecture zooms out to the whole organisation. It is less about designing one system and more about the portfolio: all the systems, how they overlap, and whether they support the company's direction. Its responsibilities:
- Capability map. A list of what the business does, such as "take orders", "pay kitchens", "identify customers", "collect feedback", with the systems that support each.
- Reduce duplication. Two systems doing the same job cost twice as much to run and give two versions of the truth.
- Fill gaps. A capability with no system is usually handled by spreadsheets and heroics.
- Standards and principles. Shared rules such as "every service logs in the same format" or "customer data lives in one place", so teams can move fast without drifting apart.
- Roadmap. Where the system landscape should be in two to three years, and the steps to get there.
An enterprise architect rarely writes code for these changes. Their tools are maps, principles, roadmaps and conversations with leadership, because the changes cross every team's plans.
The shortcut
Build a capability-to-system grid and read it for two signals:
- Two or more systems on one capability → duplication. Candidate to consolidate.
- Zero systems on a capability → gap. Candidate to build or buy.
List the capabilities
Identify customers, take orders, pay kitchens, deliver, collect feedback.
Notice that "take orders" has one system per business, and that may be fine. Tiffin subscriptions and one-off catering orders are genuinely different. Duplication is a signal to investigate, not an automatic order to merge.
Drills
Answer fast — trust the rule.
What is the main scope of enterprise architecture?
On DabbaGo's capability grid, "collect feedback" has no system. What does that signal?
Tiffins and catering each have their own ordering system. What should the enterprise architect do first?
Leadership wants customers to move easily between tiffins, groceries and catering. Which enterprise change best supports that?
Remember
- Enterprise architecture steers the whole portfolio of systems toward the business's direction.
- Shortcut: a capability-to-system grid; two systems means duplication, zero means a gap.
- Trap: merging every duplicate on sight; check that the jobs really are the same first.