Optimizing IT Implementation by Using the Enterprise Architecture Approach (EA)

Businesses world-wide are faced with similar challenges including changing business conditions, shrinking profit margins, and competitive pressures. An organization is affected daily by the vast amounts of information received and stored from both external and internal environments. This information when not organized or standardized in a strategic manner, leads to the fragmentation of this same information. In turn, this fragmentation negatively affects an organization’s productivity, competitive advantage and thus its profitability. This chapter discusses the importance of developing a system that not only works in support of, but hand-in-hand with the specific needs of a given business. Through the discussion of its main characteristics and its implementation, it will be shown that the Enterprise Architecture Approach (EA) meets this specific need, as it provides the “blue-prints” to strategically organize information.