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Bridging Business and IT Strategies With Enterprise Architecture:
Realising the Real Value of Business-IT Alignment
By Sushil Chatterji
Why Enterprise Architecture?
The extent of enterprise architecture (EA) adoption and practice varies widely across countries and industries. There are several factors that may be attributed forthis, such as availability of skilled and experienced practitioners, uncertain outcomes of EA efforts in other organisations and, perhaps the most telling, actual value realised from EA programmes. Although the EA discipline itself is more than 20 years old, generally it has not been given the due recognition it deserves for being able to bridge business and IT strategies effectively. There is wideacceptance of the need for strategic IT planning and information architecture (COBIT processes PO1 and PO2 respectively). Nonetheless, there is still a lack of understanding in many circles that EA delivers the fundamental platform for the elusive business-IT alignment— perhaps because the ‘art’ of doing EA is confined to a few individuals in the IT planning function of an organisation. For EApractitioners, chief information officers (CIOs) and IT heads, one of the most difficult challenges is to obtain business buy-in to and sponsorship of their efforts. The key lies in articulating the business value of undertaking EA. This issue lies at the crux of the business-IT alignment goal and is not made any easier by the fact that the EA story has had a somewhat chequered past. How then todemonstrate the true value that EA brings? The rest of this article will attempt to shed some light on this. granular, loosely coupled, business-event-driven distributed systems based on reusable components, which emphasises the use of well-defined component interfaces. Adaptability (the ability to re-engineer older systems in response to new business process requirements or to incorporate newtechnologies) is the strongest allure of the adaptive EA approach for most organisations. For business-IT alignment (what an organisation should architect), the EA process provides a tightly focused ‘stream of logic’, which links the business drivers and business strategic requirements directly to an IT investment portfolio designed to support those strategies and respond to those threats andopportunities. This is represented in figure 1. Figure 1—Guiding the Transition From Strategy to Outcome

Mission

Vision

Strategy

Enterprise Architecture Value
A successful (or an adaptive) EA is not an easily accomplished undertaking. The EA efforts are demanding and difficult because a wide range of dynamics that affect the organisation must be identified, examined and ranked by the relevancethey have on business processes and IT investments. EA is a process that demands ‘creative collaboration’ amongst business and IT strategists, technology implementers, and experts on market and competitive strategy. Senior managers will demand that the costs of the EA effort (time and talent) be justified by the benefits that flow from it. This process stage is designed to provide thisjustification. The value of an adaptive EA can be divided broadly into two classes: • More efficient, cost-effective and flexible engineering solutions • Improved alignment between IT investments and businessstrategic requirements For engineering quality (how adaptive distributed computing systems should be developed), the EA discipline highlights the adaptive value of creating (for example) highly
Businessand Technology Transformation Portfolio and Programme Management Enterprise Architecture

Fostering an EA Culture
It is universally accepted that a viable and successful EA cannot be built without the understanding and support of the business. Unfortunately, the majority of corporations do not have EA professionals because their organisational structures exclude the kind of collaboration and...