Corporate culture, or the “way of life” of an organization, is a critical success factor for the development of enterprise architecture. Having the “right” shared beliefs, values, and norms is the difference between an EA that lives, breathes, and informs the organization’s decision making and an EA that sits around as useless shelf-ware. As an executive at steel manufacturer Nucor once said (quoted in Jim Collins’ Good to Great) “Twenty percent of our success is the new technology that we embrace . .

The primary challenge facing today’s IT leadership is to balance the overlapping waves of technology acceleration and business volatility to drive asymmetrical returns to the enterprise.