Fostering an Enterprise Architecture's Value Proposition Using Dedicated Presentation Strategies

As exclusively technology-focused solutions do not provide any strategic competitive advantages nowadays ([1]), IT service provision needs to focus on business requirements. Consequently, adequately aligned IT services need to combine a good efficiency-/effectiveness ratio and adequate innovation power with regard to a business’ overall strategic objectives ([2]). According to Henderson and Venkatraman’s model of strategic Business IT alignment ([3]), the necessary comprehensive change coordination and management approach needs to comprise business strategy, organisational structure and processes as well as IT strategy, IT related processes and infrastructure. In addition, Aier ([4]) shows that sustainable changes within an organisation demand an active participation of all affected persons (strategy of participation). At the same time, the affected systems need to be fully compatible or to be separated completely (strategy of consistency)1. Taking into account requirements of aligned and sustainable changes in an organisation, a common information and communication base is required to foster coordination between the involved stakeholders. As recent surveys by e.g. Infosys ([5]) and the Institute for Enterprise Architecture Developments (IEAD, [6]) show, Enterprise Architectures (EA) are widely expected to provide the common foundation, an integrated management of organisational capabilities, applications and IT infrastructure, can be build upon. Though recent EA developments revealed a growing maturity in this area (see e.g. Hafner and Winter’s article indicating a set of standard EA layers and a standard EA development process model, [7]), evidences from the field show, that an EA’s value proposition cannot be released easily. In particular, as our