Alignment: Summary and Analysis in the Peer-Reviewed

¶ … Alignment: Summary and Analysis

In the peer-reviewed article Complementarities Between Organizational IT Architecture and Governance Structure (Tiwana, Konsynski, 2010) the authors contend that IT architecture and IT governance design and implementation is highly dependent on systematic and process-related interdependencies that will often shift significantly over the lifecycle of any IT framework. This makes the task of ensuring adoption of IT architectural components, as diverse as Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), Web Services, Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) and other nascent enterprise platform technologies, are continually aligned to the business' strategic programs, plans, strategies and initiatives. This is where the article unifies IT governance and IT architecture, concentrating on how each are critically important for ensuring the agility of an enterprise over time. Through a well-defined methodology and use of advanced statistical analysis techniques including Factor Analysis, the authors convey how the alignment of IT architectures and governance frameworks to business objectives enable an enterprise to be more agile in turbulent markets. The conclusion is that greater organizational agility can be attained by use of systematic use of IT architectures and governance frameworks. It architecture modularity as defined by loosely coupled integration of key process and system areas in conjunction with standardization of IT architectures and governance frameworks are a foundation of greater IT agility and over time, greater IT alignment to business objectives (Tiwana, Konsynski, 2010). IT Governance influences the alignment of IT architectures and frameworks in the process.

Analysis

The implications on information assurance and enterprise security of having IT architectures that are modular enough to integrate with existing processes and systems yet standardized enough to minimize the potential for security threats are significant. Beyond the specific areas of IT governance decentralization and the use of IT implementation decentralization to maintain agility, the implications of information assurance and enterprise security are direct and significant on TI agility and IT alignment to strategic goals and objectives.