The world is changing at a pace faster than ever experienced. Several trends in demographics, technology, the environment, globalization, public attitudes, and political institutions are driving Government1 and Industry agendas as never before. In order to respond to the demands and needs of their stakeholders, organizations need to develop new and better ways of managing continuous change at ever-increasing pace to deliver significant value in a transparent manner.

Organizations need an enterprise architecture function as an integral capability in order to support the requirement for continuous change. However, over the years, many organizations have attempted to set up enterprise architecture practices only to see them fail after a few years. These failures are due to several reasons, such as an inability to merge enterprise architecture processes with the other management processes within the organization – for example, demand management – or the lack of authority for enterprise architects – for example, when making strategic decisions or quality assuring programs and projects.

In spite of these previous failures, organizations are again trying to set up enterprise architecture functions as they have found that no other pragmatic alternatives exist.