Please read this scenario prior to answering the question.
Your role is that of a consultant to the Lead Enterprise Architect to an international supplier of engineering services and automated manufacturing systems. It has three manufacturing plants where it assembles both standard and customized products for industrial production automation. Each of these plants has been operating its own planning and production scheduling systems, as well as applications and control systems that drive the automated production line.
The Enterprise Architecture department has been operating for several years and has mature well-developed architecture governance and development processes that are based on the TOGAF Standard. The CIO sponsors the Enterprise Architecture.
During a recent management meeting, a senior Vice-President highlighted an interview where a competitor company's CIO is reported as saying that their production efficiency had been improved by replacing multiple planning and scheduling systems with a common Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system located in a central data center. Some discussion followed with the CIO responding that the situations are not comparable and the current architecture is already optimized.
In response, the Architecture Board approved a Request for Architecture Work covering the investigations to determine if such an architecture transformation would lead to improvements in efficiency. You have been assigned to support the architecture team working on this project.
A well-known concern of the plant managers is about the security and reliability of driving their planning and production scheduling from a remote centralized system. Any chosen system would also need to support the current supply chain network consisting of local partners at each of the plants.
Refer to the scenario.
You have been asked to explain how you will initiate the architecture project.
Based on the TOGAF Standard, which of the following is the best answer?