Scenario:
Please read this scenario prior to answering the question
Your role is that of the Lead Enterprise Architect at a multinational automotive corporation. The company is headquartered in Germany, and manufactures cars, trucks and buses. It has manufacturing plants across North America, South America, Europe and Asia. Each of these plants has been operating its own planning and production scheduling systems, as well as custom developed applications that drive the automated production equipment at each plant.
The company has an ongoing initiative to improve the efficiency of all of its production operations, and in particular to reduce its carbon footprint. During a recent exercise held for internal quality improvement, it was determined that a significant reduction in energy usage could be achieved by replacing the current planning and scheduling systems with a common Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system located in one central data center. This central system would provide support to each of the plants replacing the functionality in the existing systems. It would also eliminate the need for full data centers at each of the plant facilities.
The Enterprise Architecture department has been operating for several years and has mature, well-developed architecture governance and development processes that are strongly based on TOGAF standard.
At a recent meeting, the Architecture Board approved a Request for Architecture Work sponsored by the global CIO. The request covered the initial architectural investigations and the development of a comprehensive architecture to plan the transformation.
The architecture project team has now been formed, and has been asked to develop an Architecture Vision that will achieve the desired outcomes and benefits.
Some of the plant managers have expressed concern about the security and reliability of driving their planning and production scheduling from a remote centralized system. The CIO wants to know how these concerns can be addressed. During the initial project team meeting a number of alternative recommendation for how to proceed have been put forward by members of the team.
Refer to the Scenario
You have been asked to select the most appropriate recommendation to ensure that the team evaluates different approaches to the problem and clarifies the requirements for the architecture.
Based on the TOGAF standard, which of the following is the best answer?