Week 6 - Future-State Architecture: Conceptual Level

Future-State Diagrams
(Conceptual Level)

     Future-State Diagrams are in my opinion one of the most important and most frequently used Enterprise Architecture artifacts.  For that reason, I spend a great deal of time on these documents to make sure they 'tell the story'. Being able to reach a common understanding with regards to our end state with your stakeholders is critical.  Nothing does a better job at this than Future-State Diagrams and there is no single way to describe your Future-State.  Below are a few examples.

Future-State Diagrams can describe what a new process flow (swim lane diagram) will look like.  

Figure 1 - Future State - Car Sales Process Flow

They can be used to describe how systems will interact with one another.

Figure 2 - Integration of IBM storage systems with a VMware environment

They can also depict what your future architecture will look like.

Figure 3 - An Introduction to Enterprise Architecture

References:

Bernard, S. A. (2012). An introduction to enterprise architecture (Third ed.). AuthorHouse.

Concept Diagram. (n.d.). Retrieved October 03, 2016, from https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/HSG_ISIS_110/UG/isis_ug_ch1_concept.html 

Enhance business process flows with branching. (2016). Retrieved October 03, 2016, from https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn887193.aspx