Enterprise Architecture (EA) is fairly new to colleges and universities. It was initially used in government and large corporations to align technology spending with business strategy. This expanded into many areas including networking, security, applications, cloud computing, risk management, governance, capability-based planning, change management, as well as infrastructure architecture.
The definition of EA has changed over the years and the latest version from Gartner is Business Outcome-Driven EA:
Business Outcome-Driven EA is a practical approach designed to deliver signature-ready and actionable recommendations to business and IT leaders. These recommendations enable business and IT leaders to adjust policies and projects to achieve target business outcomes based on the business direction and relevant business disruptions. — Gartner
EA helps to standardize technology solutions and tries to avoid building one-off systems that few people can support. It also makes sure when new systems or applications are acquired there is consideration for things like interfaces, security, and business continuity. Getting more visibility into all of the technologies on campus also helps eliminate duplication of applications and services.
Technology Innovation (TI) is about keeping up with current technologies and finding opportunities to incorporate them into the technology architecture. Innovation is very important to staying current and competitive in the higher education environment. It leads to efficiencies and savings related to things like power consumption, space, speed, and time needed to implement projects.
Enterprise Architecture and Technology Innovation together help to guide technology directions and improve technical solutions and applications.