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A theory building study of enterprise architecture practices and benefits

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Abstract

Academics and practitioners have made various claims regarding the benefits that Enterprise Architecture (EA) delivers for both individual projects and the organization as a whole. At the same time, there is a lack of explanatory theory regarding how EA delivers these benefits. Moreover, EA practices and benefits have not been extensively investigated by empirical research, with especially quantitative studies on the topic being few and far between. This paper therefore presents the statistical findings of a theory-building survey study (n = 293). The resulting PLS model is a synthesis of current implicit and fragmented theory, and shows how EA practices and intermediate benefits jointly work to help the organization reap benefits for both the organization and its projects. The model shows that EA and EA practices do not deliver benefits directly, but operate through intermediate results, most notably compliance with EA and architectural insight. Furthermore, the research identifies the EA practices that have a major impact on these results, the most important being compliance assessments, management propagation of EA, and different types of knowledge exchange. The results also demonstrate that projects play an important role in obtaining benefits from EA, but that they generally benefit less than the organization as a whole.

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Notes

  1. Tamm et al. (2011) have made a worthwhile effort to render some of these implicit views explicit.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Rik Bos, Jurriaan van Reijsen, Verena Dräbing, Nico Brand, Anne-Francoise Rutkowski, Joe Nandhakumar and the reviewers for their valuable remarks.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. UWV, CIO Office and Data Services, La Guardiaweg 116, 1040 HG, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Ralph Foorthuis

  2. Sogeti Netherlands, Postbus 76, 4130 EB, Vianen, The Netherlands

    Marlies van Steenbergen

  3. Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Princetonplein 5, 3584 CH, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Sjaak Brinkkemper

  4. IBM Netherlands, David Ricardostraat 2-4, 1066 JS, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Wiel A. G. Bruls

Authors
  1. Ralph Foorthuis
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  2. Marlies van Steenbergen
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  3. Sjaak Brinkkemper
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  4. Wiel A. G. Bruls
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ralph Foorthuis.

Additional information

January 10th 2015. Final version. Accepted for publication in Information Systems Frontiers.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Questionnaire items and examples

1.1 Key questionnaire items

Regarding the architecture approach…

  • T1. The EA is formally approved (i.e. by line management).

  • T2. The choices made in the EA are explicitly linked to the business goals of the enterprise as a whole.

  • T3. Management propagates the importance of EA.

  • T4. Projects are being explicitly assessed on their degree of compliance with EA. [Note: this concerns the number of projects being judged on compliance (not the number of times one project is being assessed).]

  • T5. There is an organized knowledge exchange between different types of architects (for example enterprise, domain, project, software and infrastructure architects).

  • T6. There is an organized knowledge exchange between architects and other employees participating in projects that have to conform to EA (for example project managers, functional designers, developers and testers).

  • T7. Assistance is being offered in order to stimulate conformance to EA. (For example enterprise architects or change managers who help projects to make new designs conform to EA.)

  • T8. Projects make use of a PSA (Project Start Architecture).

  • T9. Document templates are being used to stimulate conformance to EA. (For example templates that focus attention on the EA by means of guiding texts and by requiring filling in relevant information.)

  • T10. Financial rewards and disincentives are being used in order to stimulate conformance to EA. (For example by covering the IT-expenses of a project if the solution is designed and built conform EA, or by imposing a fine for non-conformance.)

EA turns out to be a good instrument to…

  • B1. …accomplish enterprise-wide goals, instead of (possibly conflicting) local optimizations.

  • B2. …achieve an optimal fit between IT and the business processes it supports.

  • B3. …provide an insight into the complexity of the organization.

  • B4. …control the complexity of the organization.

  • B5. …integrate, standardize and/or deduplicate related processes and systems.

  • B6. …control costs.

  • B7. …enable the organization to respond to changes in the outside world in an agile fashion.

  • B8. …co-operate with other organizations effectively and efficiently.

  • B9. …depict a clear image of the desired future situation.

  • B10. EA turns out to be a good frame of reference to enable different stakeholders to communicate with each other effectively.

  • B11. EA, in general, turns out to be a good instrument.

Projects that have to conform to EA turn out to…

  • B12. …exceed their budgets less often than projects that do not have to conform to EA.

  • B13. …exceed their deadlines less often than projects that do not have to conform to EA.

  • B15. …deliver the desired quality more often than projects that do not have to conform to EA.

  • B16. …deliver the desired functionality more often than projects that do not have to conform to EA.

  • B14. …be better equipped to deal with risks than projects that do not have to conform to EA.

  • B17. …be better equipped to deal with complexity (of the project and/or its immediate environment) than projects that do not have to conform to EA.

  • B18. …get initialized faster than projects that do not have to conform to EA.

  • O1. Projects that are required to conform to EA turn out to actually conform to the architectural principles, models and other prescriptions.

  • O2. Principles, models and other architectural prescriptions turn out to be open to multiple interpretations.

1.2 Example of a slightly non-linear relationship (between EA approach and architectural insight)

figure a

Appendix 2: Overview of individual contributions

Formative constructs allow summarizing the individual indicators in order to focus on the substantive theoretical relationships at a higher level of abstraction. However, since each formative indicator represents a different aspect, it is advisable to also drill down and study the relationships at the indicator level (Carver 1989). The discussion of individual practices and benefits in Sections 4.3.3 and 4.3.4 is informed by the tables below. These tables provide insight into which individual formative indicators of independent constructs contribute to one or more indicators of dependent constructs. This gives further support for the causal effects in our study and to the composition of constructs. To the best of our knowledge, no methodological instructions exist for this at the time of our research (note that the construct weights cannot be used in our study). We therefore took a critical and conservative approach for verifying the individual contributions: each table column represents a separate PLS model with one dependent variable, with the partialized coefficients of the independent variables in the rows competing with each other (as opposed to mere correlations, which have a higher likelihood of being statistically significant). Therefore, the more rows a column has, the higher the probability of non-significant coefficients. Also note that these columns are not ‘final’ models, since we did not drop statistically insignificant variables. Rather, they are aimed at providing insight into all variables.

*p < 0.1 **p < 0.05 ***p < 0.01 ****p < 0.001

Table 8 Individual practices of EA approach
Full size table
Table 9 Project compliance with EA
Full size table
Table 10 Individual items of architectural insight
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Table 11 Individual items of EA-induced capabilities
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Table 12 Individual items of project performance
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Foorthuis, R., van Steenbergen, M., Brinkkemper, S. et al. A theory building study of enterprise architecture practices and benefits. Inf Syst Front 18, 541–564 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-014-9542-1

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