Analyst company Gartner says that enterprise architecture practitioners are becoming more focused on business strategy than on IT management.

“We are finding that the majority of EA practitioners are aspiring to leverage EA to enable business value, growth and transformation, not only to drive IT decisions,” said analyst Betsy Burton. “While this has been a vision for EA for many for years, we are now hearing many clients clearly voice this same vision and aspiration of EA.”

“If your organisation is still thinking about EA as an IT-only discipline or developing an IT-focused guidance, you are in the minority of your peers,” she added.

This may be the case, but even by Gartner’s own estimates EA is still primarily an activity for the IT department. In early 2011, just 9% of EA ‘efforts’ were supported as a collaboration between business and IT. That proportion will increase to 30% by 2016, Gartner predicts.