Lack of Communication and Collaboration in Enterprise Architecture Development

Abstract

Enterprise architecture (EA) is widely employed to reduce complexity and to improve business-information technology (IT) alignment. Despite the efforts by practitioners and academics in proposing approaches to smoothen EA development, it is not easy to find a fully successful EA. Because EA development is a complex endeavour, it is important to understand the obstacles that practitioners face during EA development. With the grounded theory, we studied how obstacles during EA development emerged from practitioners' point of view in 15 large enterprises. The study identifies lack of communication and collaboration as the core obstacle that can explain many other obstacles. Communication and collaboration were also harmed by other perceived EA development obstacles, including lack of knowledge and support inside organization and issues imposed by external parties, hesitation in training personnel, setting too ambitious goals, constant change of management, (lack of) clarity in EA development process, lack of budget, forcing personnel to adopt EA, lack of motivation, organizational culture, and organizational structure deficiencies. The lack of communication and collaboration caused several undesired effects to organizations, such as being unable to set common goals and achieve a shared understanding, personnel's distrust, endangered EA governance, lack of innovation capability, lost competitive edge, and ineffective EA outputs. The study highlights that organisations should improve their communication and collaboration before embarking on EA to encounter fewer obstacles. We provide four recommendations for practitioners to improve communication and collaboration in EA development.

Factors Influencing Communication and Collaboration in Enterprise Architecture Development

“…Enterprise Architecture (EA) development projects encounter different challenges, and not all of these projects end with success [26]. Challenges like the lack of establishing proper EA governance [13], lack of shared understanding [24], lack of leaders' trust [2], organizational politics [6], no management support [11], EA artifacts being outdated and of low quality [20], sabotaging the EA development by giving wrong information [21], and communication and collaboration challenges [3,6,13] have been identified. Thus, it is not surprising to see that 66 percent of EA projects did not fulfill the expectations of surveyed organizations [26].…”

“…EA introduces a significant change to the organization and change may bring considerable resistance. The manner in which EA is developed (design and implementation) significantly affects the perception and behaviour of the stakeholders in EA development [3,21]. Therefore, the social and human behaviour in EA development should be considered carefully in order to improve the stakeholders' ability to adapt and accept the changes.…”

“…knowledge, emotions, will, body language) [31]. Based on the recent findings lack of communication and collaboration was also proved to be the most critical obstacle in EA development [3]. In all of the phases of the EA development, vivid communication with stakeholders is indispensable and critical [5], and it is argued that failing to establish communication is a major challenge in an EA development [14].…”

Enterprise architecture implementation as interpersonal connection: Building support and commitment

“…Further stakeholder research has examined the different subgroups within the stakeholder community (Roth, Hauder, Zec, Utz, & Matthes, 2013) and the types of barriers that can exist between architects and these communities, including differences in the knowledge and background of architects and stakeholders (Abraham et al, 2015). Although many scholars have identified communication and collaboration between architects and their stakeholders as a major issue affecting the success and failure of EA initiatives, an explanation of the interpersonal forces that leads to such a breakdown in relations between architects and their stakeholders is incomplete and not grounded in theory (Banaeianjahromi & Smolander, 2017;Nikpay et al, 2016;Abraham, 2013;). Furthermore, much of the research and literature that investigates issues of shared understanding and communication between architects and their stakeholders is focused on the development stage of an EA, and very little attention has been given to the implementation stage (Banaeianjahromi & Smolander, 2017).…”

Where enterprise architecture development fails a multiple case study of governmental organizations

“…The obstacles in this level are more of technical and strategical type. The importance of communication and collaboration in EA development have been well discussed in[47].…”