On the Changing Role of Enterprise Architecture in Decentralized Environments: State of the Art

The decentralization of organizations and subsequent change to their management and operation style requires major changes in organization processes and heavily involves the IT. This paper demonstrates, however, that EA is primarily aimed at centralized organizational structures and as such has shortcomings when applied to decentralized organizations. Overcoming these deficiencies requires new principles to be introduced and incorporated into EA knowledge. A potential source for these principles are peer-to-peer architectures, which tackles the problem of decentralization in its own way. This paper presents prevalent decentralization principles from peer-to-peer, and how they have the potential to be applied to EA.