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It is widely recognized that the role of corporate IT (Information Technology) has transformed radically over the last decade (see, for example, Hirvonen, 2005). Today it serves not only to support business strategy, but increasingly and more importantly to drive and shape it – and vice versa (Ross, 2003, and Malan and Bredemeyer, 2005). This strategically much more salient role has inspired plenty of both academic and industry effort around the notion of enterprise architecture. Unfortunately, there is no shared definition of enterprise architecture. Malan and Bredemeyer (2005) explain that with the evolution of the notion – “enterprise architecture has evolved during the past decade from enterprise architecture as technology architecture (EA = TA), to enterprise architecture as enterprise-wide IT architecture (EA = EWITA), to enterprise architecture as the architecture of the enterprise, encompassingbusiness architecture along with enterprise-wide IT architecture (EA = BA + EWITA).” Consequently, there are a number of definitions, which differ mainly by their scope. We understand the notion to cover business architecture as well and therefore later on in this work we refer with the term enterprise architecture to its broadest scope.

Nevertheless, Ross (2003) gives an excellent definition of enterprise IT architecture as “the organizing logic for application, data and infrastructure technologies, as captured in a set of policies and technical choices, intended to enable the firm’s business strategy.” Although devised for a some-what narrower scope, we feel that it applies quite nicely for enterprise architecture as well. Furthermore, she defines the objectives of enterprise IT architecture to be identifying IT capabilities, which “specify what the architecture enables the business to do.” These capabilities would include, for example, being able to access specific data for new applications, quickly add channels to existing processes, integrate data from related processes, ensure secure processing for electronic transactions, provide an extended online customer service or replicate systems in new locations (Ross, 2003). Again, we see the definition to apply well for the broader scope, too.

Enterprise architecture is the outcome, though an evolving one, of a strategic planning and management process where an enterprise architecture framework is applied to describe both the current (“as-is”) and future (“to-be”) states. These descriptions consist of high-level abstractions, or architectural views, of system model from different perspectives, or architectural viewpoints (Tang et al, 2004). However, the choice of viewpoints as well as the scope and precision of every view is specific to each framework. Additionally, some frameworks utilize a concept, which they designate as architectural segments, composite views or themes, to ensure that specific requirements, which cross-cut a number of architectural views, are coherently fulfilled. Those requirements are categorized as non-functional requirements and we term the concept in accordance with Rozanski and Woods (2005) as architectural perspective.

Commonly the ultimate strategic goal of enterprise architecture is said to be business/technology alignment and, therefore, as a general guide one ought to derive the architecture directly from business strategy and market dynamics. However, the present rate of change in the business environment and in business strategy itself as well as the diverseness of the strategy of an enterprise operating in multiple, global markets rarely offers IT a change to truly align itself. Ross (2005) argues that companies should instead select an operating model based on “(1) how standardized their business processes should be across operational units (business units, region, function, market segment) and (2) how integrated their business processes should be across those units.” “In adopting an operating model a company benefits from a paradox: standardization leads to flexibility. By building a foundation of standardized technology, data and/or processes, our research shows a company achieves more business agility and responds to new market opportunities faster than its competitors.” Consequently, by choosing one of the operating models business determines priorities for the development of its IT capabilities.

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