Enterprise architecture: business and IT alignment

Organizations have existing systems infrastructure that are the result of decades of one-by-one implementations of specific solutions. As organizations, products, customers and technologies continue to change at an increasingly rapid rate, managers have sought overviews that will allow them to understand how Business and IT within their organization fits together. Enterprise Architecture is a representation of the organization to enable the planning of the organization changes. It includes the current and future business objectives, goals, visions, strategies, informational entities, business processes, people, organization structures, application systems, technological infrastructures, and so on.In this paper, we show how the alignment between Business and IT can be disaggregated into four different dimensions and we present some heuristics to ensure such alignment.