Toward Understanding Enterprise Architecture
Management’s Role in Strategic Change: Antecedents, Processes, Outcomes
Frank Radeke | EBS Business School | Institute of Research on Information Systems
Söhnleinstraße 8D, 65201 Wiesbaden, Germany | frank.radeke@ebs.edu
ABSTRACT
As organizations face accelerated economic dynamics, it is increasingly important to improve the capability of reacting agile to changes in the marketplace. This requires implementing and adapting internal structures in a timely manner and ensuring business-IT coordination throughout the process. Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is frequently proposed as a mean to arrive at organizational forms that allow for timely reconfiguration and to guide strategy-aligned change. This explorative study seeks to contribute to an overall understanding of EAM’s application in strategic change processes. It is based on an in-depth content analysis of existing research in the field. Specifically, it identifies common EAM practices that have been suggested for application throughout the planning and implementation of strategic change. Furthermore, it reveals antecedents and outcomes of this application. The article discusses these findings in detail and summarizes the results in a preliminary process model of applying EAM for agile strategic change.
1. INTRODUCTION
“The discontinuous market and business environments where many private and public sector organizations now operate are changing rapidly, and in different ways” [6:155]. These increased dynamics are caused by accelerated competition, technology evolution, shorter product life-cycles, and customer needs individualization [6,64]. As a consequence strategy has become a moving target. This requires rethinking traditional strategy planning and implementation techniques in order to strengthen an organization’s competency of responding to such strategic changes in an agile manner [65,78]. This comprises: Achieving and maintaining flexible organizational forms: Instead of designing organizational structures that will be fixed for several years while the strategy is executed, these dynamics require “creating, re-creating, and sustaining organizational forms that will enable a process of strategic response” [64:148]. Prahalad and Krishnan add that a “[…] manager’s ability to respond rapidly to those challenges [of organizational dynamics] is predicated
upon having a sophisticated and facile organizational and technical infrastructure, and a degree of information technology flexibility that traditional approaches cannot provide” [56:24,emphasis added].
Effective adaptation of internal structures to a strategic positioning: Organizations need to increase their effectiveness in rearranging internal structures and processes so as to achieve a close match with the ever-changing strategic positioning of the organization in the marketplace [25,67]. Past strategic information technology (IT) planning techniques that merely focused on evaluating the contribution of IT initiatives in organizations in terms of their efficiency such as service availability and cost factors have been found rather inappropriate to provide such a strategic agility. Nowadays, it is considered more appropriate to judge the strategic value provided by the investments, in order attain an IT infrastructure aligned with the changing strategic needs of the business and competitive industry [50]. The continuous coordination of the business and IT domain: Previous research has emphasized that a lack of coordination among the business and the IT domains may hinder the effective implementation of strategic change. Successful implementation requires managers from both domains to cooperate during the entire planning and implementation cycle [25,64,65].
IT’s increased strategic relevance and its role as digital options generator and enabler of digital business strategies make this need even more critical [25,63]. Recent surveys show that the timely implementation of strategic change in terms of business agility and time to market as well as close coordination between the business and IT domains in the process are ongoing key concerns of IT managers [41,67]. Facing these challenges requires a holistic planning and steering approach that considers the entire organization and enables close and ongoing business-IT coordination. Enterprise architecture management (EAM) has been suggested as such an approach. Matthee et al. note: “Changes and transformation on all levels of the organisation are becoming imperative because of the growing uncertainty in the global business environment. EA is therefore growing in importance since it is seen as a tool to manage these changes” [45:15]. EAM is put forward as strategic change tool for several reasons; these include:
Guiding purposeful organizational evolution: Enterprise architectures (EAs) are used to describe the current state of an organization in terms of a as-is architecture and the intended strategic state, in terms of a target architecture. It is proposed that an EAM core concept is to guide the focused evolution toward the target state by providing systematic support for organizational changes [2,10], directing organizational transformation [3,5], and offering directions for the deployment and integration of future technological and managerial developments [20,74]. Enabling flexible organizational forms: EAM is proposed as a way to manage organizational complexity and to foster agile organizational forms that allow for more flexibly addressing strategic change than it would be possible with rigid organizational structures [34,58,60].
Ensuring continuous alignment between the business and the IT domain: EAM is also put forward as mean for fostering business IT coordination and for synchronizing the strategic development paths of business and IT structures [23,33,36,60]. Ross motivates: “The objective is to get to the point where IT capabilities shape business strategy while business strategy shapes IT capabilities in response to changing market conditions and organizational realities. To do this the firm must develop an IT architecture competency to dynamically adjust strategies and technologies” [60:33].
These discussions suggest that EAM can provide the means to support improved handling of strategic change. However, this role of EAM is largely uninvestigated in past EAM research. It has not yet offered a holistic understanding of how EAM can be employed in the process of managing strategic change and how this in turn
helps to address the above-mentioned challenges. Instead, EAM research is considered fragmented as well as dominated by a multiplicity of prescriptive artifacts, such as EAM frameworks, methodologies, and tools [36,52]. Although EAM literature highlights potential benefits associated with EAM’s strategic application, such as strategic agility, improved strategic goal attainment, or alignment of business and IT objectives [33,62], this relationship has been rarely explained. Moreover, it is necessary to examine contextual factors that may influence such relationships [7,33,35,57]. Aier et al. (2008) as well as Bucher et al. (2006) emphasize that no overall understanding of EAM applications such as its employment in strategic governance processes has emerged. Moreover, situational factors’ impact on these applications is unclear. Asfaw et al. (2009) argue that fundamental questions remain on how organizations use EAM concepts to manage strategic change and transformation in organizations. They further add that there is limited understanding of the enablers and challenges of using EAM for this purpose. This explorative study seeks to help closing this gap. By taking a process theory perspective [44,49,73], it aims to gain a deeper understanding of how EAM can be employed in the process of managing strategic change. It further inquires about how such application contributes to the strategic change process’s outcomes and seeks to identify antecedents to the EAM application. In short, this article addresses the following overall research question: How can enterprise architecture management support organizations in the management of strategic change?
Section 2 lays the foundation for the remainder of this paper by clarifying basic terms. The article then describes the employed research design. This paper’s result section first discusses the identified EAM practices related to the strategic change process. It further illustrates the contribution of these practices to the process outcomes and outlines identified antecedents to effective application. Finally, the article summarizes the results in a preliminary process model and discusses future research avenues.
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Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is frequently proposed as a mean to arrive at organizational forms that allow for timely reconfiguration and to guide strategy-aligned change. This explorative study seeks to contribute to an overall understanding of EAM’s application in strategic change processes.
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