Enterprise Architecture

Digital twins promise added value to your company. Enterprise architecture helps you understand digital twins’ role in your organisation in relation to other systems and services – necessary for robust and sustainable digital twins.

How does Enterprise IT Architecture (EA) help in practice? Traditionally, EA starts with the Motivation Stack, aimed at providing the rationale for the change. From there, we can determine the services and products delivered, and derive the necessary technology via business processes, applications, and data.

In our vision, that same line of reasoning should be applied to digital twins:

  • Which services should the digital twin offer to its physical counterpart and why?

  • What data processing and application functionality is required to deliver those services?

  • What physical assets (or technology components) supply the information we need?

Usually, physical assets are already in place, so they’re a natural starting point for digital twins. They pose the crucial question: what information comes from assets, and when it’s processed what application functions might use data from other systems?

This combination creates insights via dashboards and enhances data with AI and machine learning models. Thinking in EA terms helps decide what to do with those insights. For example, we can ask: will they be the basis for proposed action for an operator or even actions performed on the physical twin in an automated manner?

Another aspect of EA involves documenting decisions and designs in such a way that they can be traced back to the “why”. For this, there are widely used techniques such as TOGAF and Archimate, both coming from The Open Group. TOGAF provides a process basis from initial idea to design, and Archimate is used to document the results of the process .

Archimate and TOGAF

More details on our way of working and the role of EA can be found here.