Enterprise Architecture: Beyond Business and IT Alignment

Abstract

IT has always embodied both a huge opportunity and a misunderstood asset in most enterprises. Today, pressure has never been so hard on IT executives to reduce cost and complexity while bringing value. Enterprise architecture was born in an attempt to address this very challenge. But while serving its original purpose, it usually focuses on business and IT, overlooking other aspects potentially required for envisioning enterprise transformation. The latter is becoming more and more compulsory and IT has never been so pervasive in today’s enterprises. In this context, approaching transformation through a business/IT duality as in most enterprise architecture methodologies proves to be insufficient. Pervasive IT infers the consideration of other aspects, all intermingled one another. One possible way to deal with this reality is to model the enterprise as a graph of aspects, beyond business and IT. By putting weight on the relationships between those aspects, one can delineate a Minimal Spanning Tree that would constitute a pragmatic yet complete frame of analysis. Applied to an imaginary business case, the aforementioned approach proves to be relevant for enterprise analysis in a holistic yet pragmatic way. It can also be integrated in existing frameworks, either as an extension, or as an overarching frame for a hypothetic enterprise transformation practice. Yet, many additional works need to be achieved before envisaging such a practice in the future.