The term Enterprise Architecture refers to a collection of technology components and their interrelationships, which are integrated to meet the information requirements of an enterprise. This section introduces the concept of Enterprise IT Architectures with the intention of providing a framework for the various types of technologies used to meet an enterprise's computing needs.

Data warehousing technologies belong to just one of the many components in an IT architecture. This chapter aims to define how data warehousing fits within the overall IT architecture, in the hope that IT professionals will be better positioned to use and integrate data warehousing technologies with the other IT components used by the enterprise.