In the last decades, numerous developments and legal changes moved the utility industry towards a liberalized market. Utility enterprises have to stay competitive and reduce costs while managing more complex IT systems. The authors of this work see special demand for aligning business and IT for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in this industry and identify the development of a reference enterprise architecture (R-EA) as a key for this issue. This work investigates how to develop such a reference model, which comprises data acquisition as well as validation methods.