IT strategy and IT Architecture Frameworks are too much based on Business strategy and Business Architecture.

Today both IT strategy and IT Architecture Frameworks are too much based on Business strategy and Business Architecture. One makes this as prerequisite architecture activity that needs to be undertaken, if not catered for already in other organizational processes (enterprise planning, strategic business planning, business process re-engineering, etc.). But is this smart when one expect that the business strategy will last much longer than the IT strategy?

Christian Wig has some interesting remarks:

“When people tell me that the IT strategy should be 'driven' by the business strategy, I normally tell them that their underlying paradigm is fundamentally wrong. Or I ask them to provide me with a business strategy having a 10 years’ time perspective, which - of course - never exists (and never should exist). Or, I tell them that if we meet again 10 years from now, in the same boardroom of the same company, that they will be highly frustrated by how the IT architecture of the 2020s actually prohibits business development - driven by the 'business-driven' IT decisions we made together back in 2010.

This paradox is a quite critical one facing most businesses today: The technology platform that supports their business areas, products and processes have a much longer life-span than the business strategies which the technology is supposed to support. And at the same time, no technological platform will be 'prepared' for handling anything that wasn't explicitly foreseen and planned for. So the ability to look around the corner, and actually plan for the unplanned, is what I really focus on.”