What is business-IT alignment? How does IT align itself with the business when the business itself is not aligned? While enterprise architecture originated in the IT organization, its scope must expand beyond IT to maximize its benefit to the organization. SOA and BPM have both refocused their attention on “business architecture”, but what does the term really mean?

Most people accept that large, complex enterprises need to effectively manage their knowledge about how they oper-ate and seek to operate. Without this understanding, they can’t make informed decisions about how to create trans-formations. Models of the enterprise contain knowledge and support decision making. However, modeling has al-most universally failed to deliver on its promises and to be effectively adopted as a way of managing knowledge to transformations in large enterprises.

Today’s CIOs face a ticking clock: Every year, according to one estimate, between one-quarter and one-third get the boot. Using the higher rate, that’s a turnover of 50 percent every 21 months. Not much of a honeymoon for them, and a deeply destabilizing fact for the rest of the organization.

What gives?

Though there are no definitive answers, IT industry watchers have identified one problem that seems to run rampant among IT leaders—a lack of “vision,” meaning long-term strategic business thinking.