Enterprise architecture (EA) is a business function concerned with the structures and behaviors of a business, especially business roles and processes that create and use business data. An Enterprise Architect is at the top level of the architect hierarchy. This means they have more responsibilities than solutions architects. While solutions architects focus on their solution, an enterprise architect focuses on the overview of the whole organization. An enterprise architect leads over many solutions architects and business functions. By international consensus, Enterprise Architecture has been defined as "a well-defined practice for conducting enterprise analysis, design, planning, and implementation, using a comprehensive approach at all times, for the successful development and execution of strategy. Enterprise architecture applies architecture principles and practices to guide organizations through the business, information, process, and technology changes necessary to execute their strategies. These practices utilize the various aspects of an enterprise to identify, motivate, and achieve these changes." Overview As practitioners of enterprise architecture, enterprise architects support an organization’s strategic vision by acting to align people, process and technology decisions with actionable goals and objectives that result in quantifiable improvements toward achieving that vision. The practice of enterprise architecture: It helps business and IT managers to figure out the best strategies to support and enable business development and business change – in relation to the business information systems that the business depends on. Topics The terms enterprise and architecture The term enterprise can be defined as describing an organizational unit, organization, or collection of organizations that share a set of common goals and collaborate to provide specific products or services to customers. In that sense, the term enterprise covers various types of organizations, regardless of their size, ownership model, operational model, or geographical distribution. It includes those organizations' complete socio-technical systems, including people, information, processes, and technologies. The term architecture refers to fundamental concepts or properties of a system in its environment, embodied in its elements, relationships, and in the principles of its design and evolution. Understood as a socio-technical system, the term enterprise defines the scope of the enterprise architecture. Scopes Perspectives, or beliefs, held by enterprise architecture practitioners and scholars, with regards to the meaning of the enterprise architecture, typically gravitate towards one or a hybrid of three schools of thought: Enterprise IT design – the purpose of EA is the greater alignment between IT and business concerns. The main purpose of enterprise architecture is