Enterprise Architecture Design and the Integrated Architecture Framework

I’ve recently been catching up on the Microsoft Architecture Journal. This is an occasional MS publication, which can be downloaded from the

.NET Architecture Center. It’s got a lot of good articles, with a software architecture and process focus.

Of particular interest, there’s an article in the first edition by Cap Gemini on “Enterprise Architecture Design and the Integrated Architecture Framework”. Obviously every consultancy has their own architecture framework, and they all share some features, but what makes this one a bit different is the strong focus on the contextual (business context), conceptual (vision) and logical (solution independent capability) aspects, with technical details relegated to a bottom physical layer. It also has one of the best discussions I’ve seen on the relationship and differences between enterprise and project architectures.