Aligning Business and IT Using Enterprise Architecture

Business and information technology alignment plays an important role in the business operation, especially in today's growing competition environment. It can make IT fulfill the business needs and IT value realize. Unfortunately, in spite of the improvements, alignment continues to the top executive surveys as a critical initiative. Alignment needs special skills, tools and methods. Enterprise architecture (EA) is an emerging approach which has been proven in some organizations to meet alignment demand. This paper introduces the alignment background, analyzes some alignment issues, and presents a brief introduction of EA framework's common components. Finally, a practical method is described to implement the alignment so as to improve organizations innovation competency.