EA & Enterprise Control Boundaries

Before moving to a more interconnected way of doing business, the world where employees would pick up the phone and enter an order into a mainframe, life was relative simple from an Enterprise Architecture point of view. The span of control over the IT landscape was everything that was inside your enterprise and the number of inbound and outbound interfaces where limited or safeguarded by a human interaction undertaken by an employee.

Moving to the current state of doing business for enterprises and how enterprise systems become sub-systems of a wider hybrid cloud landscape the span of control is more complex to control and becomes more complex to unify in an enterprise architecture. Even though it becomes more complex it also becomes more important and critical from both an enterprise wide confidentiality, integrity as well as availability point of view.

Define what you control
To be able to have a clear visibility on systems and sub-systems that jointly form your enterprise wide IT landscape that provide services to the business the use of Domain Driven Design and the correct mapping of business capabilities comes into play. A more detailed insight into mapping business capabilities for Domain Driven Design can be found in another post.

If you have a clear insight in the Bounded Contexts as defined in your Domain Driven Design for your enterprise you can also map the relationships between them.