Organizations have long struggled to optimally align their assets (people, processes, information, and technology) with their business strategy in order to drive execution and to deliver business outcomes. Enterprise Architecture (EA) emerged in the late 1980s as a type of practice catered to helping document information technology assets.

The spread of technology in businesses has completely shifted the practice of enterprise architecture. Today, technology is pervasive and there are no longer only "IT" decisions or only "business" decisions. This new dynamic has made managing technology asset investments more complex due to the distribution of systems, information, processing power, and application.