Enterprise Architecture as Strategy

 Key features

• The authors stress four counterintuitive or controversial points about enterprise architecture:

   

• Anchoring allows for greater freedom. Enterprise architecture must map a firm's stable core activities to enable its strategic flexibility so that it can respond incrementally to changing market conditions rather than overhauling itself with each new demand and related strategy.
• Operating models matter more than business strategies. Managers should base their enterprise architecture on a firm's operating model, not on its business strategy, because the latter is often vague, unstable, and short-lived, whereas the former defines a simple but lasting vision of how a firm will survive and grow.
• It affects every new job description. Poor enterprise architectures force managers at all levels to design job roles and business processes to circumvent the shortcomings of the system rather than to exploit their strengths, and so only those non-IT leaders who understand how each part of the business makes money can determine the architecture.
• It can be a lever for knowledge management. Delivering enterprise architecture capabilities is a learning process that managers can leverage by capturing and disseminating business knowledge through corporate governance and management practices.