Case Study: EA Aligns IT With Business' Emergent Strategy

Enterprise architecture (EA) programs are becoming more business focused and helping IT to deliver greater value to business. Business-focused EA teams are developing the "next practices" for interacting with the business, collecting and analyzing data, synthesizing across domains, and communicating the resulting architecture. In this case study, an EA team at an investment bank ran into difficulty with its business areas' ability to describe their business strategy. The EA team took a bottom-up approach to characterize the "emergent strategy" and created an "emergent architecture" to support this strategy. The result? Kudos and buy-in from top-level management — but although the process can be successful, it may be difficult for some firms to adopt. EA teams should add this approach to their arsenal.