In the current economic situation many companies and organizations may ask - why should we use our low budgets to invest in something such abstract as an enterprise architecture?

In fact, it is usually really a difficult topic to fully use the benefits an efficient architecture provides for an organization. Many EA projects fail due to the lack of common understanding of all stakeholders on what the actual strategic objectives are.

Enterprise Architecture is a complex term -even experts in the field still dispute about what it exactly means.

But instead of trying to give just another definition of the term I will give you an example how an IT department can benefit from a good enterprise architecture.

IT is an important part of an enterprise architecture as it is usually one the most complex organizational parts in a large company.

A typical problem in any larger organization is the lack of a harmonized and coordinated software development and IT structure. Each department develops its own IT solutions for an existing problem even if a similar problem occurred in other departments before.

By analyzing the processes that lead e.g. to the development or buying of a new software and comparing them to similar ones in other departments, mismanagement can be uncovered. So it might be more efficient to implement an architecture that unifies all decision procedures leading to the development or buying of a new tool.

In this way the portability of applications could be increased and software development, support and maintenance costs will be significantly lower.
A more sustainable architecture like this will also reduce the future cost of upgrading existing components or even exchanging them.

Having a unified IT architecture also makes a company more flexible on deciding if to buy, out-source IT solutions or even develop their own ones. In this way the risks of future investments are reduced.