A Self-Fueling Coordination Model for Enterprise Architecting Effectiveness

Enterprise "architecting" is the process of developing, updating and maintaining the EA. The goal of EA is to align business process and IT for the effective execution of business strategy. But the architecting process involves many stakeholders with very diverse and often conflicting goals. This makes architecting a daunting process. However, coordination in EA has received very little attention in the literature. A prior study reported that there are three fundamental types of coordination, each affecting architecting differently: (1) communication - the most prevalent, but least effective coordination mechanism in EA, (2) task programming - less prevalent but a very necessary type of coordination for EA success, and (3) team cognition - less understood but the most critical predictor of EA coordination success. In this paper we report on two case studies that investigated one highly successful and one less successful EA practice. Both organizations had competent business, IT and EA staff and active architecting coordination via communication and task programming. Only the successful organization, however, had strong team cognition, underscoring the importance of cognitive coordination in architecting.