Enterprise Architecture is Important

An enterprise strategy should be to maximize the harmonization between its people, processes and technology. Business processes are the key underpinning of operational excellence; people & technology are important and critical enablers to achieving it. There has to be a robust and scalable framework to make this functional and that framework is the organization's enterprise architecture (EA) strategy.
Having a visionary EA is by far the most important first step that any organization should have. An EA is a visionary who understands & predicts how the future of the company may be in 10 years. With that vision in mind she defines a framework for EA through business architecture, application architectures, information architectures & technology architectures. EA should never start from the identification of a technology platform and application suites - a myopic view of the enterprise and a recipe for failure!

A popular misconception is that business processes alone forms the business architecture for an enterprise. Processes form the dynamic view of the enterprise whereas the static view is also imperative depicting a modularized set of 'business' components each fulfilling a set of business functions. These business components needs to be categorized into business competency areas to eventually form a business map that depicts the entire enterpise. Assessments performed on this business map assists the stakeholder to define a prioritization of business initiatives that required IT enablement.

They key is business to IT alignment and this is the stepping stone towards its achievement.

Would be happy to describe more on how to shape the enterprise architecture for an organization in a methodical approach.