| Summary: | IT architecture is often assumed to follow business strategy, to align IT with the
business's strategic objectives. Increasingly, though, many business strategies depend
on specific underlying IT capabilities. To develop a synergy between business strategy
and IT architecture, firms must develop organizational competencies in IT architecture.
My research has identified four IT architectural stages, each with its own requisite
competencies. The "application silo architecture stage" consists of IT architectures of
individual applications. The "standardized technology architecture stage" has an
enterprise-wide IT architecture that provides efficiencies through technology
standardization. The "rationalized data architecture stage" extends the enterprise-wide
IT standards to data and processes. And the "modular architecture stage" builds onto
enterprise-wide global standards with loosely coupled IT components to preserve the
global standards while enabling local differences. Each stage demands different
organizational competencies to implement the architecture and prepare the firm to
move to the next stage
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