Segment Architecture

What is it?

Segment Architecture (SA) is the process of looking at your organization from the perspective of “What We Do” and reviewing the business processes, services (applications), information (data), and technology that support that function.  Segment Architecture is part of Enterprise Architecture, but produces segment specific artifacts with more tactical results.

Octo’s Segment Architecture approach takes the best practices from the FSAM and various federal and industry Enterprise Architecture frameworks.  Our approach is different from others in that we rapidly produce the artifacts and information that will help your organization make better decisions, improve service to customers, and lead to quality system implementations.

Why do you do it?

Segment Architecture provides you the ability to map to your customer in thinking about the services and applications that support their business functions.  Segment Architecture enables you to consider business functions without being held to specific technologies or vendors that implement those functions for you currently.

Segment Architecture is also used as a good process to view your organization holistically, provide evidence for budget requests, and document business processes.  A Carefully thought-through segment architecture can reduce the risk of implementing services and applications that support those functions, improve re-use of services, and reduce cost.

What do you get?

Going through Octo’s Segment Architecture process produces a documented business process that can be used to map to your as-is systems and data.  To-be business process models and data models are produced to represent the ideal process that the organization strives to achieve for that segment.

These artifacts are combined to produce the end result which is a target set of candidate services and applications for your organization that represents the recommended architecture for the investigated segment.