A Brief Outlook of Enterprise Architecture Role in the Digital Age

Abstract

Enterprise architecture, as an independent well-established discipline, continued to add value to the complex business of information technology during the past forty years since its appearance in the 1980s. It was a logical response to the increase of the complexity of the information systems within the different organizations in different industrial sectors and the need to find an organized pathway to navigate this chaos. However, recently in the 2010s, the digital transformation as an independent wave derived by the emerging disruptive technologies and the business needs, at the same time, hits every aspect of the way of doing business and changed both the business and technological landscapes forever. Enterprise architecture is no expectation by any means. It was hit too by an increasing demand to adapt to this wave as well as an increasing demand to be able to add additional benefits to this wave at the same time. Hence, there is a need to understand what happened when enterprise architecture, as an independent well-established discipline, was hit by the digital transformation as an independent wave. This paper is going to provide a clear answer to this legitimate and important concern by examining the related existing literature as well as by providing recommendations to the future research agenda of the field.