A situated approach to enterprise architecture management

Today´s enterprises are confronted with a challenging environment that demands continuous transformations. Globalized markets, disruptive technological innovations, and new legal regulations call for enterprises, which flexibly adapt to these requirements. A commonly accepted means to guide such enterprise transformations is enterprise architecture (EA) management. Enterprises seeking to introduce and establish such a management function see themselves confronted via a plethora of tools, approaches, and frameworks that claim to provide “the definitive design prescriptions” for an EA management function. The applicability of the different prescriptions nevertheless heavily depends on the organizational context and the EA-related goals that the enterprise wants to pursue. This paper presents an extensible set of selection guidelines, that helps enterprises to choose the EA management approach best suited for their goals and context. These selection guidelines are linked to different EA management approaches and frameworks, which are related to organizational contexts, in which they can operate, and EA management goals, that the approaches can help to pursue. Utilizing the selection guidelines, an enterprise can specify the applicable context as well as its EA management goals, and is provided with a selection of suitable approaches. Finally an outlook critically reflects the findings of the paper and provides an outlook on future areas of research.