Technical Architecture Perspective and Enterprise Technology Architecture Overview

Technical architecture (architecture) viewpoint or Enterprise Technology Architecture (ETA) defines reusable standards and guidelines for technology and product usage, describing how they interoperate and support other viewpoints such as business and information.

An enterprise technology architecture should not only define component‑level recommendations but also specify which combinations or configurations of these technical components should be repeatedly used in separate implementations (technology patterns) and which should be shared as infrastructure (technology services).

Starting Enterprise Technology Architecture Development – Every EA viewpoint begins with defining a future state: identifying requirements, establishing EA principles, and creating a future‑state model, followed by defining the current state, performing gap analysis, and creating a migration roadmap.

Before any modeling work, recognize that all models are generated from the Enterprise Architecture (EA) process; EA practitioners and related roles must follow the process to generate models.

Enterprise Technology Architecture Organizational Concepts

Technical Domains : Traditional methods group components into technical domains based on technology or organizational similarity; common domains include networking and databases.

Although technical domain models are necessary and useful, they are not sufficient on their own. A holistic, end‑to‑end view is required so that designers can clearly express models that more effectively convey the goals of application and shared‑service delivery.

Technical Patterns : Patterns help map business requirements to technical (infrastructure) designs; a pattern encapsulates a class or set of components required for successful applications.

Technology Services : Services are reusable components implemented as single units (including processes and people) but are not required by every application; they often consist of components from multiple domains, such as WAN, mainframe, analytics integration (data warehouse), and transaction integration (EAI, IEI). Technology services can also directly support application services, and other reasonable component collections like frameworks (e.g., Java EE) may be considered.

An example of a 3‑tier transaction pattern is shown below.