Implementing World Class IT Strategy

Chapter 6Enterprise Architecture

Chapter Four described how IT can help itself by helping the company and its divisions generate their strategies in a way that enables IT to create a strategy of its own that prioritizes and supports the divisions’ various objectives in a coordinated and efficient way. Chapter Five highlighted the method of using those inputs to formulate IT’s own strategic plan. Both of those steps may still leave unclear how strategy at all levels connects with the material resources that IT manages in terms of hardware, software, and applications. To bridge that gap, this chapter describes a concept called “enterprise architecture” (EA) that helps to ensure a tight tie between strategies and IT tools and solutions.

Generally ...