Implementing enterprise architecture generally starts with documenting the organization's strategy and other necessary details such as where and how it operates. The process then cascades down to documenting discrete core competencies, business processes, and how the organization interacts with itself and with external parties such as customers, suppliers, and government entities.

Having documented the organization's strategy and structure, the architecture process then flows down into the discrete information technology components such as:

1. Organization charts, activities, and process flows of how the IT Organization operates
2. Organization cycles, periods and timing
3. Suppliers of technology hardware, software, and services
4. Applications and software inventories and diagrams
5. Interfaces between applications - that is: events, messages and data flows
6. Intranet, Extranet, Internet, eCommerce, EDI links with parties within and outside of the organization
7. Databases and supporting data models
8. Hardware, platforms, and hosting: servers, and where they are kept
9. Local and wide area networks, Internet connectivity diagrams

Wherever possible, all of the above should be related explicitly to the organization's strategy, goals, and operations. The Enterprise architecture will document the current state of the technical components listed above, as well as an ideal-world desired future state (Reference Architecture) and finally a "Target" future state which is the result of engineering tradeoffs and compromises vs. the ideal. Essentially the result is a nested and interrelated set of models, usually managed and maintained with specialised software available on the market.