Confirmation on Need for Enterprise Architecture

The need for institutions to have an enterprise architect has become more apparent, and can no longer be seen as just an opinion as I discovered in this article from Computing SA. A study conduct by Harvard Business report evaluating more than 200 companies worldwide found that companies that decided to utilize and define their enterprise architecture strategies had a significant competitive advantage. Below are the findings on the companies that participated who placed an importance on Enterprise Architecture.

- More competitive, especially in terms of entering new markets and launching new products and services.

- More profitable, both through increasing revenues and slashing costs.

- More easily able to embrace change, including regulatory change.

- Able to remove duplicate and redundant processes, including the IT systems which support these processes.

- Able to cut IT costs (by up to 25%), identify payback on IT and more easily merge the goals of business and IT.

- Able to manage their data more easily, with less manual rekeying of data, and reduced data error and redundancy.