During the past two to three years, the concept of enterprise architecture and its implications on the way we are organizing our business and operations have gained a major increase in awareness. Like never before,CIOs are faced with justifying to a business group, such as a board of directors, how technology supports business goals, both now and in the future. Mainstream Fortune 1000 businesses and federal agencies have adopted enterprise architecture as a way to incorporate their best practices and experiences into decisions about technology investments, compliance and emerging technologies, such as Web services, service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and business process management. This paper explores the basic ideas of enterprise architecture, the areas where it adds value to the decision making process in today's Organizations and discusses the evolution towards actionable architectures.