ABSTRACT
IT architecture is often assumed to follow business strategy, to align it with the business's strategic objectives. To develop a synergy between business strategy and IT architecture, firms must develop organizational competencies in IT architecture. The case studies illustrate that firms hone their ability to define and align IT and business strategy by accumulating architecture-related experiences. Firms' common experiences in evolving their IT architectures suggest four distinct stages of increasing enterprise IT architecture competency. Firms in the application silo architecture stage focus their IT resources on delivering individual applications. The standardized technology architecture stage is the most common among the forty firms in the sample. Although no firms in this study have migrated to the modular stage, those with rationalized data architectures provide insights into the promise they see in modularity. The executive committee continues to address strategic IT prioritization and investment issues. Creating a strategic IT architecture competency is a long, difficult process.
