Enterprise Architects Should Lead Business Service Portfolio Definition

CIOs rank improving IT value communications as a top priority — and many are realizing that a strategy of organizing IT assets, capabilities, and costs around business-relevant services may be the best approach to doing this. Business services connect IT's people, process, and technology resources to the business outcomes they enable. Business service catalogs describe the entirety of the IT organization's offerings that support the business. But making sure that the services and the catalog structure are relevant to business management and aligning services and business capabilities are crucial success factors. Enterprise architecture (EA) groups are the only resource within IT that has the breadth of scope to map IT assets to business services, and EA's business architecture investments provide the basis for a business-relevant catalog of services. This provides EA groups the opportunity to directly address a top CIO priority.