For decades, corporate executives and department managers have complained about the budget overruns and schedule delays that invariably accompany complex IT business planning and transformation projects. The fact that these costly undertakings often fall short of achieving the planned business objectives only serves to increase their frustration. The underlying causes for these failures include:
- the complexities of modern organizations,
- the intricacy and size of applications,
- as well as miscommunication between business, operational and IT experts who each speak their own jargon.
The moving target of evolving business services and technologies only exacerbates the situation.
Focusing on an enterprise architecture perspective has emerged as an effective way to surmount these obstacles. As a business driven approach, this perspective encompasses the broader relationships between business strategy and processes, as well as the supporting information systems, data and IT infrastructure.
This paper provides an overview of the enterprise architecture concept and highlights how an actionable enterprise architecture approach can help organizations progress EA from the ivory tower to the front lines of decision making.