NIST Enterprise Architecture Model

NIST Enterprise Architecture Model (NIST EA Model) is a late-1980s reference model for enterprise architecture. It defines an enterprise architecture by the interrelationship between an enterprise's business, information, and technology environments.

Developed late-1980s by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and others, the federal government of the United States promoted this reference model in the 1990s as the foundation for enterprise architectures of individual U.S. government agencies and in the overall federal enterprise architecture.

The NIST Enterprise Architecture Model is a five-layered model for enterprise architecture, designed for organizing, planning, and building an integrated set of information and information technology architectures. The five layers are defined separately but are interrelated and interwoven. The model defined the interrelation as follows:

The hierarchy in the model is based on the notion that an organization operates a number of business functions, each function requires information from a number of source, and each of these sources may operate one or more operation systems, which in turn contain data organized and stored in any number of data systems.

The NIST Enterprise Architecture Model is initiated in 1988 in the fifth workshop on Information Management Directions sponsored by the NIST in cooperation with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the IEEE Computer Society, and the Federal Data Management Users Group (FEDMUG). The results of this research project were published as the NIST Special Publication 500-167, Information Management Directions: The Integration Challenge.

With the proliferation of information technology starting in the 1970s, the job of information management had taken a new light, and also began to include the field of data maintenance. No longer was information management a simple job that could be performed by almost anyone. An understanding of the technology involved, and the theory behind it became necessary. As information storage shifted to electronic means, this became more and more difficult.

...
Wikipedia