Effective Enterprise Architecture competencies foster business-IT alignment by connecting business goals with technology, enabling better planning of future IT investments and transformations.
These competencies enable the following:
- Drive corporate-wide transformation and digitization initiatives
- Enable strategic business goals using better operational excellence, more customer intimacy, greater product leadership, or more strategic agility
- Maximize the return on investment of customers’ Enterprise Architecture initiatives to drive and support the successful business transformation with the following:
- Promoting business-outcome-driven, enterprise architecture-focused engagements
- Make operational innovations by taking IT strategy and existing investments into account
- Support communication between different stakeholders from business and IT
- Avoid the creation of IT systems that add further complexity to the existing IT infrastructure
- Document decisions for later reference (reuse) and follow-on projects
Key Characteristics
Key characteristics of enterprise architecture are to apply a holistic view across the organization, embracing business and IT along all functions, while also considering external factors. It is largely featured by defining and introducing a common language and vocabulary.
One important dimension in enterprise architecture is time. To-be models depict the envisioned future state, while as-is models help assess the gap between the current and future state and translate it into a road map.
Different artifacts help structure and visualize the enterprise architecture at various time stages and alongside different architectural domains.
Characteristics:
- Organizations are viewed holistically in terms of business and IT, to ensure that enterprise goals and objectives are addressed in a holistic way across all business and IT projects.
- High level of abstraction that defines a common vocabulary between business and IT.
