Metadata Architecture — EA's Key Contribution To The Industrialization Of IT

Business pressures have forced IT management to begin applying formal management disciplines to the delivery of IT services. In the past decade we have seen the rise of portfolio and project management methodologies — IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), IT service management (ITSM), Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT), and several other methodologies — that each apply best practices to a sharply focused area of IT management. While these methodologies have broadened the adoption of best practices, they have also created silos of individual practices within IT. IT executives are beginning to look at how to bridge those silos to enable an integrated approach to manage business technology from planning through implementation and operation. EAs should develop a metadata architecture to support process integration — and enable the industrialization of IT management.