Today’s enterprise needs coherent and effective IT architecture. There has been a revolution in business practices leading to the rise of the boundaryless organization, and the consequent requirement to architect a technical infrastructure for Boundaryless Information Flow™. According to Meta Group, technical architecture consistently ranks in the top 5 priorities of Global 2000 companies. But developing a good architecture means employing good architects, and this is a primary concern for the CIO. The emergence of a true IT architecture profession will help to address this concern, and there are signs that this is now beginning to happen.

Good IT architecture has never been so important. As Tom Kitt, Minister of State with special responsibility for the Information Society in the Republic of Ireland, puts it, the physical boundaries of business have mostly gone, and IT brings opportunities for people to work together in innovative ways. Interoperability is necessary for delivery of customer-centric services, and this can only be achieved through a common architecture.

The Future Store project of Germany’s Metro Group, the world's fifth-largest retail chain, provides a good example. Its aim is to create a new kind of retail environment with innovative customer features such as self-checkout, electronic shelf labelling, personal shopping assistant, and information terminals, using modern technology such as wireless networking and RFID. Its development involved over 50 partners, including product suppliers in technical areas such as software and RFID, retail goods suppliers, and service providers. It required a cross-organizational architecture to deliver business value, with low setup costs to accommodate changes of partners. Ard-Pieter de Man, a Professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology who has been intimately concerned with the project, remarks that technology infrastructure is needed to support collaboration, and a good IT architecture will increase the benefits of an alliance.

The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) is the joint second largest bank in the world, with a staff of 250,000 people- 23,000 of whom are in IT. HSBC grew by acquisition and had major cost problems delivering and integrating software across regions due to differences in standards and practices. To solve these problems, its CIO sponsored a common architecture approach with a core team of 200 people and at cost of about $25 million.