You are serving as the Lead Architect for a chain of convenience stores, which has over 2000 retail outlets throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The stores operate
24 hours a day and 7 days a week and use the latest cloud-based point-of-sale (POS) technology to manage their sales and inventory. Cloud-based POS systems store all user data, including sales and inventory in a remote server.
The cloud-based 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. The stores also act as self-service delivery locations for a large online retailer which further increases the number of potential customers entering the stores.
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 support the existing environment and accommodate future changes of strategy within the company.
The CIO has stated that the following issues also need to be addressed in the restructuring:
- They need to address problems with data quality and inconsistent data in order to support better decision making and analysis.
- The architecture should focus on the needs of the business, not technology.
- To remain competitive, new products and promotions must undergo market trials before deployment 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.]