Enterprise Architecture – New Business Value Perspectives

Organisations today are characterised by conglomerate organisation structures that evolve through mergers and acquisitions. Corporate offices need to add superior knowledge and skills to ensure that the collection of diverse businesses is operating as more than independent units. A new management approach is required to create synergies between the diverse businesses, their processes and system landscapes. Enterprise Architecture (EA) creates value on a corporate level by facilitating process/information technology alignment and synergy between different strategic business units (SBUs). Unfortunately many EA implementations seemed to fail owing to a short-term financial focus and measurement. This article explores the possibilities of linking EA to a corporate balanced scorecard (BSC) to demonstrate its long-term financial improvement capabilities in supporting the business strategy. The aim is to use the corporate BSC context to direct EA objectives in creating contextualised value for a specific enterprise.