The term enterprise architecture seemed to appear in the mid-late 1990s as large companies realised that the opportunities IT offered were not without challenges. Businesses were finding that they seemed to be spending an ever increasing amount of time and effort on IT delivering diminishing returns; with three main causes:-

1. Huge amounts of money spent on failed projects.
2. Complexity:  systems grew into unwieldy stubborn beasts which could not be easily tamed or trained to perform new tricks.
3. Technology evolution:  as soon as you bought and deployed the latest technology it became obsolete; and you developed proprietary implementations which could not easily be migrated to new platforms.

In order to manage the challenges associated with these problems the discipline of enterprise architecture and the EA frameworks were developed to help companies ask the right questions and manage risk.

But these frameworks are not the answer, they only help you ask the questions.

The last 10 years has seen many companies create, and then being encumbered by heavyweight architectures.

TOTEM can help you create an enterprise architecture for todays dynamic business environment that takes advantage of new techniques provided by patterns such as SOA, implementations such as web services and agile project methodologies.