IT Enterprise Architecture (EA) has a reasonably long history with many organizations having EA teams in place. EA is supposed to be a way of logically dealing with the ever growing IT complexity and in some optimal way driving the strategic goals the enterprise is striving for. However, have these teams delivered on this promise? Unfortunately, the answer is usually unclear and too often at TechVision Research we’ve seen these teams as fodder for elimination during cost cutting. Even during good economic times we still see these teams as cost cutting targets because it’s so difficult to identify their true value. This is especially true for those enterprises that see IT as a cost center. On the surface, Enterprise Architecture sounds like a good thing: what IT executive does not want to optimize IT? In most organizations the CIO is seen as the strategic guru of technology in the business and EA is often a part of his/her team. Yet, we have rarely seen the case for general agreement that EA is a necessity for business success. We can argue that even though EA has existed for decades and created many standards, policies, diagrams – and all the meetings to stamp approvals – much of the effort has been driving less redundancy, fewer applications and other compromises for cost reductions, not for disruptive competitive advantage. The reality of EA is we have colleagues at very large companies who were head of (or a key member of) the IT EA team leaving as either victims of cost cutting or just being tired of conducting futile endeavors that have little impact and still require continuous justification for their existence. In this report we suggest it’s time we accept the reality that the EA function as we know it is of little use in today’s IT and will be of even less use in the future as more organizations shift their services and technology to the cloud.  As discussed in this report, EA must evolve to stay (or for the first time become) relevant to the business. This report covers:

• The relationship between EA and the ever-increasing IT complexity
• Is the tight coupling between Enterprise Strategic Planning and EA good or bad?
• Why large IT frameworks have failed to produce useful measurable business results
• What is Enterprise Architecture in the age of consumerization/cloud?
• Should EA become Enterprise IT Product Managers?
• Why EA should be about extracting the maximum advantage for the enterprise, scratching out competitive advantage by the sum is greater that the component parts
• What the new Enterprise IT World looks like and how EA must evolve to stay relevant