Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is a prominent discipline for purposefully guiding the complex, coevolutionary business-IT relationships in organizations. Means to realize such guidance are, among others, mechanisms to coordinate heterogeneous and potentially conflicting stakeholder concerns. Yet, organizations face challenges to successfully leverage their EAM initiatives, often as a result of coordination mechanisms that only reach specific stakeholders or selected contexts.In the paper at hand, we aim at introducing coordination as a research lens for analyzing and designing EAM approaches. To this end, we substantiate the abstract notion of coordination through its underlying formal and informal mechanisms, which are implemented by artifacts, as well as through artifact modalities in an analysis framework. For illustrative purposes, we apply the developed analysis framework to The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). We find informal mechanisms (lateral relations, communication, and socialization) comparably underrepresented, which limits not only coordination effects but may also limit the success of the overall EAM approach. Our findings call for an extended and more comprehensive perspective on coordination in EAM, motivating the complementarity of informal mechanisms as an avenue for future research.

Perspectives in organizations differ to which extent information systems (IS) should be tailored towards local (e.g., business unit) needs or toward organization-wide, global goals (e.g., synergies, integration). For contributing to overall IS performance success, the harmonization of different perspectives becomes essential. While many scholars have highlighted the role of IS management approaches, institutional studies argue that harmonization is not solely the result of managerial action, but a consequence of institutional pressures that guide organizational decision-making. In the paper at hand, we follow the call for adopting institutional theory on the intra-organizational level of analysis and study the logic of attaining harmonization along institutional pressures. By means of a revelatory case study, we find harmonization attained in a dynamic interplay between different institutional pressures. Mimetic pressures influence normative pressures, which in turn influence coercive pressures. Our findings as well as our implications for enterprise engineering guide prospective research in studying the attainment of harmonization through an institutional lens.

Abstract-As a result of growing complexities in business processes, information systems, and the technical infrastructure, a key challenge for enterprise architecture management (EAM) is to guide stakeholders from different hierarchical levels with heterogeneous concerns. EA deliverables, such as models or frameworks, are often highly comprehensive and standardized. However, these can hardly be applied without greater adaption. Although the literature selectively covers approaches for tailoring EA deliverables closer to the concerns of affected stakeholders, these approaches are often vague or not very differentiated. In the paper at hand, we aim at introducing a stakeholder perspective to EAM research that considers stakeholder concerns on EAM across hierarchical levels. To this end, we conduct a case study: Our results show homogenous concerns among stakeholders on EA deliverables. In turn, we found different concerns on the role of EAM in applying these deliverables, dependent on the hierarchical level of stakeholders. These findings stress the necessity for a more differentiated understanding of stakeholder concerns on EAM. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for an exemplary EAM approach.

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a prominent discipline that aims at guiding decisions in local information systems (IS) investments toward organization-wide objectives. Due to shortcomings resulting from the guidance of EAM as a strong hierarchical, top-down driven coordination practice, scholars have recently introduced the concept of architectural thinking. Complementary to top-down driven coordination, architectural thinking aims at local decisionmakers for applying collectivistic considerations in their decisions and hence guiding IS endeavors beyond local utilities. Yet, the question of how to enable and foster this collectivistic orientation remains unanswered. Inspired by stewardship theory, this research conceptualizes a collectivistic-oriented decisionmaker by the means of motivation. A literature review is conducted for identifying and exploring pertinent motivation mechanisms that foster the adoption of a collectivistic orientation among decision-makers, enriched with focus group data. To this end, five groups of situational and psychological mechanisms are reported. These findings set out a guidance for prospective EAM research in approaching architectural coordination through a collectivistic orientation in decision-making.

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