A theory building study of enterprise architecture practices and benefits

Abstract

Academics and practitioners have made various claims regarding the benefits that Enterprise Architecture (EA) delivers for both individual projects and the organization as a whole. At the same time, there is a lack of explanatory theory regarding how EA delivers these benefits. Moreover, EA practices and benefits have not been extensively investigated by empirical research, with especially quantitative studies on the topic being few and far between. This paper therefore presents the statistical findings of a theory-building survey study (n=293). The resulting PLS model is a synthesis of current implicit and fragmented theory, and shows how EA practices and intermediate benefits jointly work to help the organization reap benefits for both the organization and its projects. The model shows that EA and EA practices do not deliver benefits directly, but operate through intermediate results, most notably compliance with EA and architectural insight. Furthermore, the research identifies the EA practices that have a major impact on these results, the most important being compliance assessments, management propagation of EA, and different types of knowledge exchange. The results also demonstrate that projects play an important role in obtaining benefits from EA, but that they generally benefit less than the organization as a whole.

Information systems, agency problems, and fraud

“…Liao et al's (2017) evidence also adds to a growing body of important work on the role of competencies and internal audit activity in organizations (Foorthuis et al 2016;Goldschmidt 2007;Huang et al 2016;Wu et al 2016). …”

Artifacts, Activities, Benefits and Blockers: Exploring Enterprise Architecture Practice in Depth

“…Various EA artifacts used in organizations as part of EA practices can be very diverse in nature. For instance, popular EA artifacts include architecture principles [3], standards [18], core diagrams [4], business capability models or maps [19], enterprise data models [20], project-start architectures [5] and many other different types of EA artifacts [1,21].…”

“…Various EA artifacts used in organizations can be very diverse in nature and range from executive-level architecture principles [3] and core diagrams [4] to rather detailed and technical project-start architectures [5]. These EA artifacts have different usage scenarios in organizations ranging from guiding IT investments [6] to ensuring compliance of separate IT projects with an organization-wide architecture [7].…”

Enterprise architecture implementation as interpersonal connection: Building support and commitment

“…Schniederjans and Yadav (2013) found that trust issues still persist between architects and business stakeholders, adversely affecting EAI outcomes. Researchers have sought to explain the "gap" in the architect and stakeholder relationship in terms of differences in the motivations and viewpoints of architects and stakeholders (Faller & De Kinderen, 2014), organizational incentives and rewards (Foorthuis et al, 2016), conflicting assumptions and expectations associated with EAI activities (Aier, 2014), and the inability of architects to coordinate EAI activities across different functional groups (Espinosa, Armour, & Boh, 2010). Sessions (2009) describes the gap between architects and their stakeholders in terms of sensemaking and argues that stakeholders may have difficulty engaging with the EAI and that architects must eliminate any barriers to stakeholder understanding: "sometimes there is an atmosphere of mystique around enterprise architecture that makes it unnecessarily complicated, resulting in lack of understanding by the people that need to understand it" (Sessions, 2009, p. 9).…”