Enterprise Architecture as a Means for Coordination - An Empirical Study on Actual and Potential Practice

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is considered a means to guide the alignment of business- and IT-related concerns from an enterprise-wide perspective. Our goal in this paper is to understand by which means EAM supports this coordination task today and potentially in the future. We designed a questionnaire and conducted an empirical study (n=95) with participants from the field of EAM. Based on common coordination mechanisms from literature, we analyze (1) the relation between coordination mechanism and their current EAM support, (2) to what degree participants are aware of opportunities of EAM supporting coordination mechanisms, and (3) what the perceived gap between potential and realized EAM coordination support is. An exploratory factor analysis leads to three factors that represent coordination mechanisms in enterprises. Using these factors, we group participating enterprises in three different clusters: (1) non-coordinators, (2) dominators and (3) negotiators. We find that a similar awareness of opportunities exists in all three clusters, yet there are gaps in the realization of EAM coordination support: non-coordinators show the lowest realization, negotiators the highest. Based on this clustering, we provide implications on further EAM development options.