"Line of Sight" in Enterprise Architecture

Rick Murphy writes in Enterprise Architect about some of the key aspects of aligning of business strategy with architectural models through extending the semantics of modeling formalisms. His piece focusses on UML metamodels, but one concept -- the idea of Line of Sight -- has broad applicability.

Achieving Line of Sight

In his keynote speech before an e-government conference last fall in Washington, DC, Norman Lorentz, outgoing chief architect of the Office of Management and Budget, identified line of sight as one of the key challenges for the FEA. Lorentz described line of sight as the ability for executives to see the significance and outcome of strategy, mission, and business drivers at all levels of the FEA.

The FEA program management office defines line of sight as "the indirect or direct cause-and-effect relationship from a specific IT investment to the processes it supports, and by extension the customers it serves and the mission-related outcomes it contributes to." Regardless of whether the framework is Zachman, FEAF, TOGAF, EAP, DODAF, or another, enterprise architects visualize the intent of an information technology investment in their artifacts.
This visualization is especially important where artifacts cross levels of abstraction. Enterprise architects empower executives to see through the levels and build credibility by modeling the intent of an information technology investment across all levels of abstraction.

The ability to discern these 'line of sight' relationships between business objectives and their means (such as IT goals and investments) and architectural components is an absolutely essential aspect of visibility and transparency in enterprise architecture modeling, whatever the formalism applied.

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