Enterprise Architecture Views--Enterprise Architecture is the practice of applying a comprehensive and rigorous method for describing a current and/or future structure and behavior for an organization's processes, information systems, personnel and organizational sub-units, so that they align with the organization's core goals and strategic direction. Although often associated strictly with information technology, it relates more broadly to the practice of business optimization in that it addresses business architecture, performance management and process architecture as well.

The primary purpose of creating an enterprise architecture is to ensure that business strategy and IT investments are aligned. As such, enterprise architecture allows traceability from the business strategy down to the underlying technology, it's implementation, and associated cross-dependencies.

The practice involves developing an architecture framework to describe a series of "current," "intermediate," and "target" reference architectures while applying them to align change within the enterprise. These frameworks detail all relevant structure within the organization including business, applications, technology and data. The end product is a set of artifacts that describe in varying degrees of detail exactly what and how a business operates and what resources are required. These artifacts are often graphical.

A strong Enterprise Architecture process helps to answer basic questions like:

• Is the current architecture supporting and adding value to the organization?
  
• How might an architecture be modified so that it adds more value to the organization?
  
• Based on what we know about what the organization wants to accomplish in the future, will the current architecture support or hinder that?