Not so long ago, enterprise architecture was the loser at any business mixer: big, unwieldy, unyielding and nearly always out-of-date. Heck, architecture wasn’t even invited to the three-year rave party hosted by Y2K, Nasdaq and the letter e. But when the nightclub door finally opened and corporate America staggered out, wincing in the daylight and fresh out of cash, there was architecture, looking better than it had in years.

While the tech party is over for now, CIOs are re-embracing the corporate standardized platforms and applications that compose enterprise architecture as a way to contain costs and ensure business alignment. But this time around, the focus is on flexibility. As companies struggle to regain control but retain enough vision to accommodate the next big thing, some are building an architecture that’s rock steady on the bottom with quite a bit of play on top. Think of a well-built skyscraper with upper floors that intentionally sway in the wind.

That design may give some CIOs vertigo, but not David Watson, a longtime IT executive who has served as corporate vice president of technology at several Fortune 500 companies. Though Watson puts his foot down?hard?when it comes to choosing IP protocols, networking operating systems and cabling, he’s willing to give ground at the database/hardware/OS level and, at the top, is perfectly happy to support a fairly wide range of business applications?provided, of course, they return strategic value.

"We are quite rigid at the bottom of the hierarchy, and that actually improves our ability to flex in the upper tiers," says Watson, now CIO at Enfrastructure, an Aliso Viejo, Calif., startup offering outsourced infrastructure and facilities to other companies. "You have to have an architecture, and it has to be flexible, but some parts should be less flexible than others."

Keeping a Loose Hold

If enterprise architecture developed a bad reputation in the past couple of years among business users, it was well deserved at least some of the time, according to Peter Weill, director of the MIT Center for Information Systems Research in Cambridge, Mass. "Architecture was presented as a standards issue at a very technical level. [CIOs] took a one-size-fits-all approach that was driven by best practices in IT, which was the worst approach," Weill says. Architecture should indeed be driven by best practices, he notes?but in business, not technology.

For Watson, that means focusing attention and spending resources on the task-specific, sometimes customized applications that drive particular business units, including best-of-business front ends, Web enablement and custom XML development. "The application decision should always be predicated on business requirements," Watson says, "but if someone’s proposing a solution that requires a different level of support, you should have the ability to do it."