Critical facts
American Express, located in New York City, was founded in 1850 (Corporate Profile, 2015).
It is one of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Corporate Profile, 2015).
American provides services such as credit cards, charge cards, and traveler’s checks (Corporate Profile, 2015).
American Express cards account for 24% of credit card transactions in the U.S. (Corporate Profile, 2015).
According to the company’s 10k, the company generates $33 billion in revenue and over $5 billion in income. The company’s total assets are over $150 billion.
American Express has one of the largest IT infrastructures and is able to handle an extremely high number of transactions each second (Demirkan, 2006).
In 2011, the company won the first annual InfoWorld/Forrester Enterprise Architecture Award for its EA initiatives (Knorr, 2011).
American Express chose to use an Enterprise Architecture (EA) as their IT framework that aligned their business and organizational needs to their information technology.
Enterprise architects were the employees responsible for using this framework to continuously make their processes more efficient and utilizing their IT/IS to the fullest extent (Pearlson and Sanders, 2013).
Analysis
I will be analyzing the success of American Express’s Enterprise Architecture, how Zachman Framework is used to structure the EA, and how this improved their existing service-oriented architecture (SOA). Changes in the way that mobile payments were being used by their clients, the company had to be flexible and adapt to the transformation. New delivery channels required American Express to adjust their prior time-to-market guidelines for payment services (Pearlson and Sanders, 2013). The company turned to its Enterprise Architecture (EA) to guide them through the current market conditions.
The opportunity that American Express saw was to use EA to meet the demands for a hastily changing
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