Enterprise architecture addresses the double challenge of increasing

E nterprise architecture is a widely adopted means for coping with organizations’ ever-increasing complexity and for ensuring that organizations appropriately use and optimize their technical resources.Enterprise architecture is an integrated and holistic vision of a system’s fundamental organization, embodied in its elements (people, processes, applications, and so on), their relationships to each other and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution (IEEE Std 1471-2000 IEEE Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems, IEEE, 2006). As the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure, enterprise architecture reflects the integration and standardization requirements of the company’s operating model to achieve business agility and profitable growth (J.W. Ross, P. Weill, and D.C. Robertson, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, Harvard Business School Press, 2006). Enterprise architecture frameworks identify the architecture’s scope and decompose its elements into structured layers and architectural dimensions. Many private and governmental organizations have adopted such frameworks for operational use. Enterprise architecture first emerged as an idea in 1980 and was embodied in John Zachman’s early enterprise architecture framework (J.A.Zachman, “A Framework for Information Systems Architecture,” IBM Systems J., vol. 26, no. 3, 1987, pp.276-292).Its reemergence as a way to cope with organizations’ ever-increasing complexity relates to evolving new business trends and IT. Business trends comprise globalization,mergers and acquisitions,e-commerce,and customer-relationship and supply-chain management. IT trends comprise advances in Internet technologies, hardware platforms,and application and workflow servers.With the increasing importance of enterprise architecture,companies such as the Open Group and IBM are offering certification opportunities in an effort to standardize an open method for IT architecture. An enterprise architecture approach can help align business and IT resources and conform them to fundamental principles and common methodologies governing the entire information systems development process. In that sense, architectural frameworks are a convenient way to support such methodologies and separate roles that facilitate and implement these methodologies as needed. Still,many organizational and technical enterprise architecture challenges remain.