Governance and Management of Information Technology - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 42

organizational structures and aspects of automa-
tion such as information systems and technology
infrastructure.
This representation of enterprise architecture
allows for continually refining information tech-
nology, without jeopardizing alignment with the
business organization and favors the permanent
retention of knowledge to facilitate decision-
making.
It is necessary to understand the concept of
services concurrently with the concept of enter-
prise architecture. A service can be defined as a
functionality that some entity (system, enterprise
unit, etc.) offers to its environment, which has value
for certain entities in the environment (typically
service users) (Lankhorst, 2005).
The importance of using the services concept
in conjunction with the enterprise architecture
concept arises from the fact that the services
concept is widespread in different areas of an
organization, allowing IT and business employees
to have a common language.
Applying the services concept in conjunc-
tion with enterprise architecture can generate
a competitive advantage, since the resulting
solution allows a better attributes` exploitation
of interoperability, flexibility, cost-effectiveness
and innovation.

of IT and resources and explains how they relate
(Dragstra, 2005).
Usually, this view is presented using a model
of four layers made up of business, information,
application, and technical infrastructure.
The business process-centric concept defines
a sequence of activities and knowledge required
to produce the desired results. In this case, en-
terprise architecture focuses on all the processes
of the organization, seeking to optimize them
and to create new opportunities for refinement
(Dragstra, 2005).
Application architectures and infrastructure
technologies are also used in this approach in a
secondary role.
The governance-centric concept is intercon-
nected with a description of the components'
desired functionalities, which is represented by
specifying the results to be achieved.
Since organizations are composed of a set of
complex systems, there are two ways to govern
them. The first way is to focus on improving man-
agement systems and control of the organization
as a whole. The second divides the organization
into a network of small manageable parts, called
business domains.
The governance-centric vision uses a govern-
ing approach and emphasizes boundary demarca-
tion on different levels (organization, processes
and implementation) and between personnel
organization and IT systems.

enterprise Architecture paradigms:
it-centric, business process-
centric, governance-centric

it subsystems

According to Dragstra (2005), there are three
approaches that aim at representing an organiza-
tion based on enterprise architecture elements in
order to achieve the alignment of business with
IT. They are IT-centric, Business process-centric
and Governance-centric.
The IT-centric concept is based on using
enterprise architectures to improve effectiveness
and efficiency in the technological area. The
IT-centric vision is a widely used approach that
creates an architecture that shows different models

One of the organization's systems is the entity
responsible for providing all IT services to other
entities of the organization. This system can be
considered an autonomous IT organization that
has three cohesive subsystems, called Direct,
Development and Delivery (Gibert, 2003).
These subsystems interact with the IT organi-
zation, enabling its alignment with the business
(Betz, 2007).