You are serving as the Lead Architect for a chain of convenience stores, operating as a franchise, which has over 5000 retail outlets throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The stores operate 24 hours a day and 7 days a week and rely on point-of-sale technology to manage their inventory.
Stores place all orders on-line. The back-office systems collect real-time data to support ordering and product selection decisions including the tailoring of product assortment based on sales history, customer demographics as well as the next day's weather forecast. In many cases, several stores are located in neighboring areas. This strategy makes distribution to each store cheaper, as well as making multiple deliveries per day possible.
An Enterprise Architecture practice exists within the company, with the CEO and CIO as joint sponsors. They have decided to adopt TOGAF 9 within the practice and the first project is to restructure the Enterprise Architecture so that it can better accommodate the changing strategies within the company and also better respond to changes in economic and technical environments.
The CIO has stated that the following issues need to be addressed in the restructuring:
✑ The systems should be able to withstand any unforeseen disruptions which might affect day to day operations. This is highly critical for ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction and maintaining and growing revenue.
✑ Dependencies between the application components, the application platform, and technology infrastructure should be minimal and well defined. This will facilitate scalability and ease of enhancement of the service offerings.
✑ The company is adopting the ARTS Operational Data Model and Data Warehouse Model from the National Retail Federation. This will address past problems with data quality and inconsistent data.
✑ To remain competitive, new products and promotions must undergo market trials and if these are successful, deployed across the retail chain. Information systems must be able to manage changes and updates without undue delays.
[Note: You should assume that the company has adopted the example set of principles that are listed and defined in TOGAF, Section 23.6. You may need to refer to Chapter 23 of the reference text in order to answer this question.]
You have been asked to identify the most relevant architecture principles for the current situation.
Based on TOGAF, which of the following is the best answer? [Note: The ordering of the principles listed in each answer is not significant.]