Information Technology Architecture is foreign to the vast majority of resources within most organizations. This is partly due to the natural alignment within a subset of an IT department. From my experiences, the resources responsible for mastering this subject matter have little operational business experience.
This is not necessarily detrimental, however the gap in knowledge introduces additional challenges to ensuring the communication and presentation of a technology stack can effectively be tied back to delivering against an organizational strategy. When compared to other cross-functional entities within an organization (sales, marketing, finance, etc.) the level of shared measures, processes, and cross role knowledge is daunting.
Providing a crystal clear perspective of the technology stack can help organizations limit enterprise communication and risk across the organization. The below image of a simplified stack describes the business value relatively well and the definition is clear.
abstract visual representation of the interaction between key business areas of concern and the technology landscape of the organisation at a given point in time. (Banger, 2017)
This depiction provides a high level perspective of the technology layers and enable enterprise architects to better manage changes to existing technology, upgrades, etc. This also enables the framework to enable a level of traceability to manage and govern organizational changes.
References
Banger, D. (2017). Back to Basics – The Enterprise Architecture (EA) Stack Simplified. Thouts From the Systems Front Line, 5.