Today's businesses may need to consider establishing the role of the Enterprise Architect (EA) as a group to oversee the maturation of an effective enterprise architecture. Enterprise Architects would initiate, design and oversee the alignment and integration of IT delivery of business systems usually starting with the development of a mapping of the various business processes, information management, technology assets at play in their area of influence then patiently and diplomatically shepherding the alignment transformation.

One goal is to transition the information management and technology implementations onto an interoperable foundation that supports the business strategy in a responsive and reactive manner. When looking how to support the alignment of IT assets to the business the EA is forced to consider four distinct viewpoints of business processing, each being distinctly separate but highly cohesive. These viewpoints include :

• the business architecture that defines the business function, workflows, events, services, resources and outputs;
• the information architecture which identifies important information assets, the structure, storage and retrieval;
• the application architecture that maps out the set of applications and their interoperation; and
• the infrastructure architecture upon which it all runs, the networks, the platforms and the resources that tend to them.