Enterprise Architecture: What Did We Study?

Abstract

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a description of an enterprise from an integrated business and IT perspective intended to improve business and IT alignment, and is used in the majority of large companies. However, despite that EA was established as an independent discipline long ago, a commonly accepted “big picture” in EA research is still missing. As a result, the scope of the EA discipline is vague, the extent of diversity in EA publications is poorly understood and the progression of the EA research stream over time is unclear. In this paper I conduct a comprehensive EA literature review covering 1075 publications aiming to structure, clarify and consolidate the whole EA research stream. I analyze the distribution of the EA research stream by time, source, research methodology and attitude, code all the issues discussed in EA publications into 42 narrow EA-related topics and 11 broader themes, establish the conceptual relationship between them and present a picture of the EA discipline “on a page”. Moreover, I classify all EA-related topics into four categories according to their lifecycles helping future EA researchers to better understand the evolution of the EA discipline and make the maximum contribution to it.

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

“…Benefits of EA practice is among the most extensively studied topics in the available EA literature and numerous studies have been conducted to analyze them [35]. For example, Bradley et al [15] demonstrate that business and IT alignment, the overall value of IT and the quality of risk management all positively correlate with the maturity of EA.…”

“…EA practices are traditionally associated with numerous problems, challenges and pitfalls, which are widely discussed in the available EA literature [35]. For example, case study-based investigations of EArelated problems and blockers have been carried out in the United States [13], continental Europe [12], Norway [38], Finland [39] and Vietnam [16].…”

Method Framework for Developing Enterprise Architecture Security Principles

“…To structure and guide the EAM-related activities, organizations use different methodologies, which have been developed both in the academia and industry. The origins of the modern EA can be traced to the Business Systems Planning methodology in the 1960s [10]. However, the term "enterprise architecture" and the related terminology were coined later in the early publications regarding the PRISM architecture framework (cf., [11]) and the Zachman Framework [12].…”

Actualización del universo de marcos de trabajo de arquitectura empresarial. Identificación, caracterización y evaluación

“…El factor tecnológico ha dejado de ser un privilegio de unas pocas organizaciones de clase mundial para convertirse en un requisito básico en cualquier industria (Minoli 2008), dando paso a un mundo digital (Jayakrishnan, Mohamad, y Abdullah 2019). Las organizaciones han aumentado las capacidades para alinear las tecnologías de la información con las estrategias comerciales (Kotusev 2017). Esto ha sido posible en gran medida por la introducción de la arquitectura empresarial, que ha funcionado como una solución para manejar la complejidad de empresas grandes y pequeñas en todo el mundo (Sessions 2011).…”