Defining Enterprise Architecture: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among researchers and practitioners concerning Enterprise Architecture (EA). Despite this increase, several studies have reported a lack of common understanding in EA. Some specific expressions like lack of common terminology, lack of shared meaning and fragmented literature have been frequently used to describe this lack. However, very few systematic studies have been conducted to gain a better understanding about the nature and the extend of these definition differences. This study presents a Systematic Literature Review considering journal articles that contain explicit definitions of EA. 145 definitions were identified and analyzed in order to determine their similarities and differences. The analysis was guided by concepts from the field of terminology. The findings of this study show that there are significant divergences of multiple kind between definitions. The next steps for the EA community would be to achieve something comparable to MacGregor's Theory X and Theory Y model or Mintzberg's schools of thought.