Enterprise Architecture C-Suite Elevator Pitch

In trying to work through the C-Level elevator pitch for Enterprise Architecture I've been reading the eponymous books by Michael Porter, "Competitive Strategy" and "Competitive Advantage"; where Porter defines the concept of the Value Chain. While reading I had one of those life changing "light bulb" moments:

Enterprise Architecture is about the identification and realisation of Competitive Advantage

The basis of the hypothesis?

Competitive advantage is obtained by having an efficient and optimised value chain. A value chain (at a high level) exists between the supplier and customer, consisting of:

• Direct Value Activities
• Indirect Value Activities
• Quality Assurance

Direct value activities are (stating the obvious) directly contributing to the value of the product (manufacturing etc). Indirect value activities are (again stating the obvious) indirectly contributing to the value of the product; an example being machine maintenance. Quality Assurance is ensuring that activities are performed correctly, to a greater or lesser degree. A value chain is a complex entity within an organisation where activities can have many connections between them and other activities; for example, a more stringent quality assurance process can reduce the cost associated with a direct value activity. In practice this example could be where the more stringent quality assurance of the component inputs to a manufacturing process results in less errors & defects during manufacture.

Identification of Competitive Advantage
Competitive advantage comes from many sources and is driven by the corporate strategy. For example, if the corporate strategy is to transform from a generic supplier in its sector to one of specific product differentiation, then competitive advantage will arise from being able to disaggregate business capabilities from the generic to the specific. In this example Enterprise Architecture can enable this by identifying the business services that are required to realise the corporate strategy and identify those that are redundant. These business services may nor may not be supplied or supported by an IT function.

Realisation of Competitive Advantage
Realisation of competitive advantage is defining the corporate implementation strategy, putting the strategy into action, transforming the business over time. Enterprise Architecture can support this, for example, by introducing EA best practices improving the effectiveness of quality assurance.

Does the hypothesis hold? I believe at first inspection this is absolutely the right direction to be taking Enterprise Architecture into the boardroom, as always the devil is in the detail. Sadly I also believe that Enterprise Architecture is now so closely linked to an IT function that barriers will be raised to the "Enterprise Architect".