Alignment is one of the most important benefits that Enterprise Architecture (EA) could bring to organizations. However, it is still unclear what mechanism EA uses to help organizations achieve alignment. Related research is very scattered, making it difficult to accumulate relevant knowledge and experiences, and thus, the more successful EA application is hindered. To address this issue, the present research examines essential requirements of alignment and mechanisms with which underlying EA deliverable models impact organizations. By doing so, we proposed a conceptual framework explaining how EA modeling activities contribute to organizational alignment. We demonstrated the use of this framework with three use cases. The results show that EA could help organizations achieve alignment in quite different ways, and our proposed framework helped us examine and understand the mechanisms. We expect this research could establish an essential common understanding of how EA enables organizational alignment, thereby facilitating academia to move forward in this field. © 2021, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.