Issue 5-9

Business and IT alignment remains a top priority for CIOs and their peers. While many CIOs have made significant progress in gaining a seat at the strategy table, a gap remains in organizing and illuminating executive business thinking in a way that drives consistent understanding throughout the organization.

The primary purpose of enterprise architecture (EA) governance is to ensure that an organization’s IT investments are closely aligned with business goals and processes, so that limited IT resources are allocated to areas of highest impact on organizational performance. While the overriding concern of EA governance is the effectiveness of the IT investments, the EA program itself needs to be governed as well, since an incorrectly developed EA could adversely impact the IT investment decisions that are based on it.

In 1937, noted economist Ronald Coase penned a short essay titled “The Nature of the Firm.” Coase was trying to understand why companies had gotten very large as the industrial revolution first emerged and then began to displace our agrarian lifestyles.