A Method and Tool for Business-IT Alignment in Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architects seek to align enterprise processes and structure with their supporting IT systems so that enterprises can flourish in their environment. The enterprise architecture (EA) discipline has emerged from business best practices. EA frameworks are therefore mostly informal. As a result there is a lack of EA tools that can help enterprise architects to check this alignment. Most notably, current EA tools do not help enterprise architects to formalize the alignment of the multiple levels that constitute an enterprise model. In this paper we propose an EA framework and an associated tool that provide alignment checking along the functional and organizational hierarchies. We illustrate this approach with the Sun Microsystems industrial example of the Pet Store.