The Impact of Enterprise Architecture Management on Design Decisions in IS Change Projects

Information systems (IS) change projects aim at developing consistent IS solutions for business needs. In order to avoid inconsistencies, redundancies, and misalignments among these projects, some form of cross-project guidance is needed. Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a prominent discipline that aims to guide IS change projects not only for local business needs, but also for enterprise-wide and long-term goals. However, EAM’s impact often remains limited due to the complexity of IS landscapes, conflicting goal systems, and design decisions that cater local/short-term rather than enterprise-wide/long-term solutions. Assuming that EAM does not necessarily guide all these potentially relevant design decisions in IS change projects, we explore dimensions and characteristics of design decisions based on empirical focus group data. To this end, we develop a classification scheme, based on which we identify two design decision types that embody hierarchical and lateral characteristics, respectively. Using this scheme, we discuss how to (re-)consider EAM for enterprise-wide/long-term solutions in IS change projects.