The Role of Enterprise Architecture as a Management Tool

Today's business environment is suffering a constant change due to the emergence of new technologies. The changes go from the customer needs until how these needs are fulfilled by organizations and enterprises. This constant change force decision-makers to adapt to these new scenarios and overcome difficulties which are the only sure outcome of this evolution. Several directors and institutions have seen this new challenge and have developed tools, frameworks, guidelines, and good practices to help and support enterprise management. Frameworks such as Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT), Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), quality standards such as the one proposed by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) and systems such as the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) are widely spread through the world and are taught in higher education institutions. Enterprise Architecture (EA), another well-known discipline, also assists in management as these other tools do. However, EA, as a discipline itself, is sometimes neither mentioned nor used within these other tools. These paper aims to analyze the role that EA plays by comparing it with the guidelines that other frameworks propose. The analysis that is done in this paper verifies if EA can be used at the same time with other frameworks or if they are not compatible. To answer that question, an analysis of the most important processes, good practices, perspectives and tools provided by each framework was performed.