Does it seem that your employees are working harder and harder, yet your company is still losing ground? That you’ve formulated a rock-solid strategy, yet your firm still can’t get ahead? That you monitor the market, listen to your customers, and respond to competitor’s moves, but your results are still lukewarm?

If so, you need to construct a solid foundation for your business execution -- an IT infrastructure and digitized business processes that automate your company’s core capabilities. In Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, authors Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C. Robertson show you how.

Establishing the right architecture has helped some of world’s most successful companies -- Dell, Camex, 7-Eleven, Japan, ING DIRECT -- not just survive but thrive despite increasingly tough global competition. These blockbuster companies excel because they’ve made tough decisions about which processes they must execute well, and they’ve implemented the IT systems needed to digitize those processes. Result? Their IT systems have become an asset rather than a liability, and have fostered unprecedented agility.

Drawing on their study of numerous companies worldwide, the authors show how constructing the right enterprise architecture enhances profitability and time to market, while it improves strategy execution and even lowers IT costs.  Through meticulous case studies and clear, engaging explanations, this book demonstrates how to:

• Assess your current enterprise architecture
• Define your operating model -- your simple but lasting vision of how your firm will survive and grow
• Implement your operating model through your enterprise architecture
• Navigate through the stages of enterprise architecture maturity
• Start reaping the benefits of your enterprise architecture

Enterprise Architecture as Strategy communicates a counterintuitive but vital message: when it comes to successful execution of your strategy, your operating model may matter more than your strategy itself.

Jeanne W. Ross is Principal Research Scientist, MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (Columbus, OH). Peter Weill  is Director of CISR and MIT Sloan Senior Research Scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology(Cambridge, MA). David C. Robertson is a Professor at IMD International (Lausanne, Switzerland). Learn more about their ideas at: www.architectureasstrategy.com.