You may not have noticed that the title of the course is “Enterprise Architecture”, while the title to the text book is “Enterprise Information Architecture” (I didn’t choose the text book, but know a few of the authors and think it is a good text).  That being said, your assignment this week is to answer the following questions by posting your answers to this exercise thread.  Remember, my definition of participation (~ 15% of your grade) is not only submitting your answers, but also that you read and comment intelligently to each others answers.

1) What is Enterprise Architecture?  What is Enterprise Information Architecture?  What is the relationship between the two or are they the same thing?

2) Along the same lines as #1 above, what about Systems Architecture?  Software Architecture?  Similarities and differences amongst all four?

3) Finally, why is Enterprise Architecture important?

Hint: You are encouraged to *research* your answers drawing on *all* material you have available to you.  Do not plagiarize, but including cited definitions is most certainly appropriate and *synthesizing* material is encouraged as part of the learning process.  Also, I don’t want to only see the book definition and wikipedia,.. the first poster is going to grab the low hanging fruit making it a bit harder on the subsequent posts 😉  I would expect to see some supporting evidence to any definition that you might find.