Theoretical Framework - IT Goverance

The Enterprise Architect is considered as a member of the IT Governance team within an organization. The IT governance team is intended to be the issuer of frameworks, methods and guidelines, and to conduct pre-studies and evaluations as responding to the prevalent business and IT strategy for the organization. Though, the IT governance group is intended “to steer” the IT business, the Enterprise Architects are envisioned “to guide” the IT business. Weill & Ross (2004) define IT Governance as “the decision rights and accountability framework for encouraging desirable behaviors in the use of IT” (p.2). Enterprise Architecture (EA) is considered as part of the IT Governance model for the organization, where the governance model involves not only the EA, but also the IT principles, the IT infrastructure, the need for Business Applications and investment requirements (Ross et al., 2006). Weill & Woodham (2002) have identified five different IT Governance archetypes as: the Business monarchy where the C-levels within the business have decision rights in the domain; the IT monarchy, identifying the CIO or the IT executives with decision rights in this domain; the Feudal where the business unit leaders have decision rights in the domain; the Federal where the decision rights are shared among senior executives, business unit leaders, process owners, IT executives and the end users; and lastly described as the Anarchy where there is no obvious or intended structure of decision rights. Niemann (2006) distinct EA from IT Governance, where IT Governance is intended to steer the IT business while the EA is intended to guide the IT business. From a senior management perspective, quantifying the business value derived from (IT) technology is essential to business leaders (Evans, 2009). Consequently, the prerequisite of both measurements (KPIs) or tools like Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan & Norton, 1996) are essential to both IT Governance and the EA, in visualizing progress and performance of the IT Service Management level (Esposito & Rogers, 2013). These authors stress the need for an IT Service Management committee, to meet in an effort to successively and accordingly to take actions to make the alignment of the IT business effective. Grembergen, van & Haes, de (2009) distinct IT Governance from Enterprise Governance of IT. In this view, IT Governance involving the Enterprise Architect as an organizational guide for the business to come, furthermore the prerequisite in measuring the progress of the EA business to be successful. The next section relates the EA to other architectures.

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