Goals in Enterprise Architecture Management -- Findings from Literature and Future Research Directions

Abstract

The Management of Enterprise Architectures (EAM) is an evolving discipline within the information systems community. By taking a holistic point of view on an enterprise, considering its business and Information Technology (IT) elements, EAM aims at a better alignment of business and IT, cost savings and faster response times. In order to achieve those benefits academics as well as industry representatives already provide methods, models and tools. Nevertheless, researchers and practitioners call for means to demonstrate the payoff of EAM initiatives. A common management approach for explicitly tracking an individuals's or team's performance and success relies on the definition of goals. To the authors' knowledge such an approach is not yet established within the EAM discipline. To improve this shortfall, this paper gives an overview on the current body of knowledge in the field of goals in EAM by means of an extensive literature study. Based on the analysis' results we present reoccurring properties of goals in EAM, possible interrelations and an initial classification. The paper concludes by providing topics for future research directions.

Enterprise Architecture: What Did We Study?

“…Niemi 42 EA benefits Niemi 43 EA stakeholders Schoenherr 44 EA terminology Schelp and Winter 33 EA language communities Stelzer 45 EA principles Boucharas et al 46 EA benefits Lucke et al 47 EA development process and its problems Radeke 48 EA and strategic change Tamm et al 21 EA benefits Haki and Legner 49 EA principles Lange et al 50 EA benefits Labusch and Winter 51 EA and enterprise transformations Mueller et al 52 EA and network organizations Schneider et al 53 EA goals Andersen and Carugati 54 EA evaluation van den Berg and van Vliet 55 EA and decision-making Petrikina et al 56 EA and business models Bakar et al 57 EA establishment process Kotusev et al 58 EA management Rouhani et al 59 EA implementation methodologies Therefore, the previous comprehensive EA literature reviews (see Table 1) presented important general weaknesses of EA research, 30,31 decent analysis of the origins and geography of EA publications 32 and exhaustive bibliometric analysis. 29 However, the content analysis presented in these reviews, [29][30][31] unfortunately, was limited to classifying EA publications according to certain frameworks that were chosen deductively before the analysis rather than came out of it inductively.…”

The Mechanics of Enterprise Architecture Principles

“…This approach is inspired by Schryen's (2013) agenda for IS value research and moves away from existing deterministic means-end relations in predominant outcome-oriented EA research (e.g., Lange et al, 2016;Schmidt & Buxmann, 2011). EA literature has already motivated this approach by identifying reoccurring EA outcomes (Schneider et al, 2013) and annotating EA outcomes in EA information models (Buckl et al, 2010). To capture the value-creation process, we employ the notion of gradual decomposition (Saaty, 1980), which is frequently applied in the literature on IS value and outcomes (Mueller et al, 2010;Peppard et al, 2007).…”

Measuring Enterprise Architecture Complexity

“…Since this research focuses on the complexity of (enterprise) architectures, the definition of complexity should be focused likewise. We take as baseline the study by [29], which proposed a more abstract approach to complexity in EA. They note that different interpretations of complexity throughout research impedes a common acceptance and understanding in the field.…”

“…Therefore, they propose a conceptual framework aimed at unifying these views on complexity. According to [29], the various aspects of complexity can be specified through four dimensions as shown in Fig. 1.…”

“…Fig. 1 Complexity dimensions [29] Central to our research is the distinction between objective and subjective complexity. This is based on the role and influence of the observer.…”