Enterprise Architecture, Strategy and Governance

Running head: ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE, STRATEGY AND GOVERNANCE
ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE, STRATEGY AND GOVERNANCE
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1ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE, STRATEGY AND GOVERNANCE
Introduction
IT governance serves as a vital part in case of enterprise governance and comprises of
the organisational structure, leadership and processes that assure that firms’ IT sustains and
also extends the companies strategies and objectives. The IT governance is not limited to the
IT domain or its function rather in a broad aspect it has evolved as an element of the entity of
the governance but specifically aims at improvising the managerial tasks and at the same time
controlling of the Information Technology in order to benefit the stakeholders those are of
primary importance. The organizations Board of Directors are responsible to assure that the
IT along with the associated complex activities is governed at an adequate basis. The
implementation of the IT governance is not new but the structural framework of the
organization is an essential parameter to decide whether the process can be executed in the
premises (De and Van 2015). The new form of the governance focuses on directing IT
endeavours in order to ensure the achievement of the objectives of the organization through
the IT’s performance. The organization needs to analyse the benefits that the IT governance
can have on it and the various opportunities that it can provide. Rational use of the resources
of the IT is a main concern in the implementation process. The risks associated with the IT
must be known to the organization, which is required in case it falls victim to any
vulnerability. In this paper the IT governance strategies will be discussed and the process in
which they help an enterprise to grow will also be discussed (Wu, Straub and Liang 2015).
The failure of the implementation of IT government is also a big concern and shall be
discussed. The theme of IT governance is integrating the leadership skills to the delivery of
capabilities of the business by making use of the goals, strategies and the objectives of IT.
The IT governance deals with strategic alignment in between the goals and the objectives
related to the business and utilizing the resources of IT (Jnr and Pa 2015). The need for the
changes and the interest that is growing marketplace related to the IT governance is the

2ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE, STRATEGY AND GOVERNANCE
outcome of numerous social and market-driven occasions that in turn has resulted in
increasing awareness of the corporate and the personal risks that are associated to the
executives (Al and Rusu 2015).
The traditional ways in which the authors have dealt with IT governance are:
1. COBIT: It is a management framework that was developed by ISACA in order to help
the enterprises grow with successful implementation of the IT strategies in the governance. It
was released for the first time in the year 1996 and in its first stage it was developed as
certain set of control objectives of the IT that helps in the financial audit community to help
enhance the growth of the environment (Couto, Lopes and Sousa 2015). The updated version
of COBIT is developed in a way to evolve in a constant manner consisting of regular updates
based on ISACA
2. ITIL: It provides the best guidelines of practice on all the aspects of the end to end
services management. It covers a complete set of people, products and processes and makes
use of partners. ITIL aids the business managers and the IT managers deliver the services to
the consumers in an effective way and thus gain the trust of the customers. ITIL plays an
important role in the business and strategic planning, to integrate and align business goals and
the IT (Jäntti and Hotti 2016). This helps incorporate continuous improvement by acquiring
and at the same time retaining the resources.
3. Zachman Framework: This framework addresses the information of the subsystem in an
enterprise. It is limited to model the components of the framework associated to the
framework of architecture. The scope of this is extended to take into its cover the various
aspects form the last version with the updated ones. The extension and the formalization is a
good combination regarding the emergence of the various modeling methodology and its way
of contributing to the enterprise architecture (Masuda, Shirasaka and Yamamoto 2016). The

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Framework for Enterprise Architecture that applies to the enterprises is a logical framework
classifying and organizing the theoretical representations of a firm that are important to
manage the Enterprise as well as helpful in the development of the firm’s system and manual
as well as the automated system.
4. TOGAF: TOGAF provides various methods and tools involved to assist in the production
and maintenance of the enterprise architecture. It depends on a process that is iterative model
and is supported by the best practices of the existing architecture assets (Wahab and Arief
2015). It helps in organizing the process involved in development via a systematic point of
approach that is focussed at decreasing the errors, maintaining the timelines still maintaining
the budget and aligning the same with the IT and the business units to obtain qualitative
results.
Reasons for failure of the implementation of the IT governance
The lack of understanding and the vision is a main drawback of the system. It
requires the people of the organization to share a common understanding and they must be
well aware of the concept. The work force should aim on questions based on Why rather than
on How. The future planning should be clear and vivid and it should be easily communicable
and appealing to the stakeholder (Benaroch and Chernobai 2017). Building the business case;
being clear about the drivers of the business and gaining agreement from a broad section of
the stakeholders that include business partners, where improvement is required and
necessary. Identifying the clear and measurable objectives for the effort of the IT governance.
Building an understanding of something what is already in place and the gap might not be as
huge as it seems. Lack of the support of the executive is another major cause of the failure of
the governance (Dawson et al. 2016). It is not possible to achieve the targets without