Enterprise Architecture Governance: The Need for a Business-to-IT Approach

The importance of enterprise architecture is not only understood in corporate IS/IT departments. The numerous usage potentials for corporate planning as well as for compliance management, business continuity management, risk management etc. are successively discovered by the business side. In order to provide an aligned support instrument for IS/IT departments as well as business units and the corporate center, enterprise architecture management has to be anchored in IS/IT as well as in business. Clear and effective governance is required to assure consistency and timeliness of enterprise architecture process outputs. Based on a business-to-IT approach to enterprise architecture, governance practices in industry are analyzed, and initial findings are consolidated which contribute to design requirements for effective enterprise architecture governance.