Positioning IT4IT in the face of classic Enterprise Architecture Frameworks

Abstract

IT4IT was introduced by the industry consortium The Open Group (TOG) in 2015 as a new reference architecture for the business view of IT management. Since TOG declared IT4IT to be a new standard and it apparently has an architecture focus, its potential use in enterprise architecture management has become a topic under discussion. In this study IT4IT is reviewed and compared with the classic enterprise architecture frameworks TOGAF and ARIS using evaluation criteria collected from literature. The results show that, although IT4IT has structural and topical similarities to classic EAFs, in particular the architecture focus and different views, its purpose and context of use is clearly different. Conforming to the concept of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), IT4IT is value oriented, service-centric, data driven, and automation focused; its position can be described best as part of an IT-related extension of a comprehensive EAF. Thus, IT4IT calls for integration with a classic EAF – without erroneously replacing or overwriting existing standards.