Today's Business/IT Environment for medium and large corporations can often be characterized as: An IT environment that is highly complex & costly - organizations were spending more and more money extending, enhancing, and maintaining existing IT systems and services Ineffective business alignment - organizations were finding it more and more difficult to keep their increasingly expensive IT systems aligned with business needs and drive the level of innovation required to grow the business

An effective Enterprise Architecture (EA) Program can deliver significant benefits to an organization including: Reduced cost to maintain existing IT systems by reducing the number of technologies in operation (lower the cost of maintenance and training) as well as increasing the utilization of IT assets Reduced time to bring new business products/services to the market by enabling the re-use of Business and IT services Increased effectiveness of IT resources (capacity planning, solution teams) including increased efficiency of operation (design for change) Increased effectiveness of Business resources by providing information and support for decision making (triggers points) and enabling impact analysis (reduce technology risk) Reduce the all-to-often "firedrills" that divert focus from business imperatives