Far too many organizations regard IT Architecture as a fairly pointless activity – a theoretical exercise mainly of interest to technical specialists. As a consequence, laboriously-constructed architectural models are all too often simply filed as 'shelf-ware', rather than being used to support critical business and IT investment decisions. Architecture certainly has a strong technical dimension, and this needs to be well defined and understood. But a technical focus is not enough. Experience shows that the lack of clear models of the current and planned future states of the business can all too easily lead to interorganizational confusion, overlapping change initiatives, duplicated effort and silo-driven decision-making.

Given today's ever closer dependence of business and IT (their 'co-evolution') and the layering and increasing fragmentation of organizational structures, the corresponding architectures should assume a much greater importance for both the CIO and the CTO. Indeed, these architectures could ultimately be seen as providing a sound basis for what we term 'Operational Intelligence', that is - what the COO needs in order to define and communicate how the business should go to market, how it should be structured to do so, and how the organization's assets should be deployed.