Information and communication technology represents an essential prerequisite, especially in the financial services sector, for planning and successfully realizing corporate strategies. Laying this foundation requires a major contribution by IT management to the development of competitive advantages and the implementation of modern business models.

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) were once regarded as the universal formula for the flexible design of business processes. But right from the beginning, the SOA concept suffered from being manufacturer-driven and from its exaggerated technological orientation. Yet the failure of many SOA projects was also a consequence of organizational shortcomings. Initiators and responsible managers often neglected to transport the business benefits of a service-oriented architecture and underestimated its impact on the company’s organization. The lack of support from top management was another decisive element.

Architecture is an issue for management

But SOA can function correctly only if the business units actively cooperate as “drivers” and the focus is on business processes, change management, and market demands/customer requirements. SOA requires more than just a common “language” between IT and business departments; there must be a synchronization between company goals and IT structure for the core business capabilities and the relevant business processes. So SOA is an issue for management and by no means a strictly technological domain. Modeling strategy, core business, and IT landscapes in effective and holistic enterprise architecture management (EAM) should consequently be one of the primary strategic tasks of the CIO and the IT department.  

The EA model reveals the relationships between business architecture, information systems, and the underlying technologies. Moreover, enterprise architecture management defines methods, processes, and governance principles which are utilized to plan and manage the further development of enterprise architecture in conformity with strategy, providing a suitable framework for exploitation of the strengths of the modular SOA approach both throughout the company and at the project level. With its help, the effects (and possible risks) of strategic plans for IT can be recognized immediately, redundant developments can be avoided, and differentiation potential to the competition can be uncovered.