Introducing a Coordination Perspective to Enterprise Architecture Management Research

Abstract

Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is a prominent discipline for purposefully guiding the complex, coevolutionary business-IT relationships in organizations. Means to realize such guidance are, among others, mechanisms to coordinate heterogeneous and potentially conflicting stakeholder concerns. Yet, organizations face challenges to successfully leverage their EAM initiatives, often as a result of coordination mechanisms that only reach specific stakeholders or selected contexts. In the paper at hand, we aim at introducing coordination as a research lens for analyzing and designing EAM approaches. To this end, we substantiate the abstract notion of coordination through its underlying formal and informal mechanisms, which are implemented by artifacts, as well as through artifact modalities in an analysis framework. For illustrative purposes, we apply the developed analysis framework to The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). We find informal mechanisms (lateral relations, communication, and socialization) comparably underrepresented, which limits not only coordination effects but may also limit the success of the overall EAM approach. Our findings call for an extended and more comprehensive perspective on coordination in EAM, motivating the complementarity of informal mechanisms as an avenue for future research.