The development of the company usually goes hand in hand with an increasingly complex IT architecture. Mergers and acquisitions make things even worse as they increase the number of redundant system functions. At the same time system lifecycles get shorter making it necessary to have a more flexible IT architecture management. It gets harder to identify the most critical information systems and cost reduction remains elusive.

The methodology and software platform ARIS aid with the creation, maintenance, and optimization of enterprise architectures based on frameworks like DoDAF, Zachman, TOGAF, Archimate, and IT City Planning. The software platform has a central database where strategy, business processes, and IT architecture are described and linked.

Enterprise architecture consists of four basic layers: Business architecture, which defines the business strategy and describes the organizational structure and processes; application architecture, which describes the services and application systems that support the business processes; information architecture, which describes the business objects and the data that is exchanged among process participants and among the systems; and infrastructure architecture, which is used to describe the physical environment – the hardware and the networks that support the information systems and applications.

The integration of the IT architecture and the business processes allows for their coordinated management. This integrated approach is very important for the effective management of the modern organization, as the business processes and the IT architectures are interdependent.

Enterprise architecture projects include:

• Definition of the IT strategy
• Description of the IT architecture
• Description of the business architecture
• Integration of the IT and business architectures
• Analysis and design of the to-be enterprise architecture
• Preparing the organization for the change.