Motivation for Coordination - a Complementary Approach to Enterprise Architecture Management Research

Abstract

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.

Introducing a Coordination Perspective to Enterprise Architecture Management Research

“…Recent studies [9,43] indicate that more mature EAM functions do not necessarily lead to business value; moreover, EAM often creates image and acceptance problems among those stakeholders it aims at guiding [44]. Hence, we argue that given a certain maturity level, EAM research and practice should not only be focused on further developing complex and strictly formalized mechanisms, but also on bringing down the coordination approach to a personalized, less formalized level [45][46][47].…”