Svyatoslav Kotusev

Purpose: Information architecture (IA) is often understood as a comprehensive master plan for organizational data assets and is widely considered as an essential component of broader enterprise architecture (EA). However, the status and practical operationalization of IA still remain largely unclear. In order to clarify these questions, this paper investigates what instruments related to IA are actually employed in organizations.Design/methodology/approach: This study builds on the analysis of architecture practices in 27 diverse organizations. Based on the semi-structured interviews with architects and the examination of utilized architectural documents, we explore IA-related instruments with their usage scenarios that have been adopted in the studied organizations.Findings: The authors identify 12 distinct instruments used in the industry and analyze in detail their features, properties and relationships. This paper analysis shows that these instruments are rather diverse and largely inconsistent across different organizations. The study findings also suggest that IA cannot be considered as a comprehensive plan for information, but rather as a variable set of loosely related instruments and practices that help organizations manage information.Originality/value: The study offers a unique perspective on the concept of IA, as it is practiced in the industry today, as well as a critical scrutiny of the respective prescriptions abundant in the existing literature. Although this study does not attempt to theorize on the findings, it makes a significant empirical contribution by offering a solid evidence-based view of IA and its key instruments currently missing in the available literature.

Enterprise architecture (EA) involves a collection of special documents, or artefacts, describing various aspects of an organisation from an integrated business and IT perspective. Knowledge management is a practice of generating, storing and sharing knowledge within an organisation and EA artefacts can be clearly viewed as special instruments for managing knowledge. Based on the analysis of EA artefacts used in 27 diverse organisations, we study the properties of the most popular artefacts through the conceptual lenses of knowledge management. Specifically, we analyse what forms of knowledge these EA artefacts represent, what knowledge management strategies they implement, what knowledge management systems they leverage and how these features correlate with other properties of EA artefacts. This study provides arguably the first available in-depth analysis of EA artefacts as instruments for managing knowledge. Our analysis demonstrates a wide diversity of EA artefacts from the perspective of their approaches to knowledge management.

In the current turbulent and unpredictable markets, competitive advantage can no longer be achieved through high product quality or efficient processes alone

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a collection of artifacts that describe an organization from an integrated business and IT perspective intended to improve business and IT alignment. EA artifacts can be very diverse in nature and have different use cases in disparate organizational activities. Previous studies have identified numerous benefits and challenges of establishing EA practice. However, most existing studies discuss the benefits and problems of EA practice in general without relating them to any particular activities constituting EA practice. In order to address this gap, this study analyzes the benefits and blockers associated with specific EA-related activities and respective artifacts. Based on 18 interviews with practicing architects, we identify eight consistent activity areas constituting EA practice. Each of these activity areas essentially represents a separate “story” in the context of EA practice and implies certain activities supported by some EA artifacts leading to specific benefits often impeded by some blockers. These eight activity areas provide a more detailed understanding of EA practice than the one offered by the current EA literature. Moreover, our findings indicate that EA practice should not be viewed as some homogeneous organizational activity and that EA should not be conceptualized simply as a unified blueprint for information systems. We also argue for the need to rethink the very terms “enterprise architecture” and “EA practice”, which appear to be oversimplified and unsuitable for analyzing EA practice in depth. This study has significant implications for both research and practice.

Enterprise architecture is a collection of artifacts describing various aspects of an organization from an integrated business and IT perspective. Practicing enterprise architecture in organizations implies using these artifacts to facilitate information systems planning and improve business and IT alignment. Despite its long history, the enterprise architecture discipline still remains largely atheoretical and lacks a solid theoretical basis. Based on our previous empirical studies of the practical usage of enterprise architecture artifacts in multiple organizations and broad literature analysis, this conceptual article identifies and discusses in detail 10 theories that can be considered key for understanding how an enterprise architecture practice works: actor-network theory, boundary objects theory, cognitive fit theory, communities of practice theory, decision-making theories, information processing theory, knowledge management theory, management fashion theory, media richness theory, and uncertainty principle. Taken together, these theories offer a comprehensive theoretical view of an enterprise architecture practice explaining the role of enterprise architecture artifacts, their usability, and participation of stakeholders and, therefore, may constitute a theoretical basis of the entire enterprise architecture discipline. Although this article does not elaborate on any of these theories, it brings these theories to light, establishes their critical importance for comprehending an enterprise architecture practice, and positions them as central to the enterprise architecture discourse. Each of these theories can be leveraged by enterprise architecture scholars in their future studies for analyzing enterprise architecture practices through respective theoretical lenses. This article intends to provide fresh theoretical insights on enterprise architecture, spark new waves of theoretical enterprise architecture research, and contribute to the development of a sound theoretical foundation for the enterprise architecture discipline.

In recent years, the literature has emphasized theory building in the context of Enterprise Architecture (EA) research. Specifically, scholars tend to focus on EA-based capabilities that organize and deploy organization-specific resources to align strategic objectives with the technology’s particular use. Despite the growth in EA studies, substantial gaps remain in the literature. The most substantial gaps are that the conceptualization of EA-based capabilities still lacks a firm base in theory and that there is limited empirical evidence on how EA-based capabilities drive business transformation and deliver benefits to the firm. Therefore, this study focuses on EA-based capabilities, using the dynamic capabilities view as a theoretical foundation, and develops and tests a new research model that explains how dynamic enterprise architecture capabilities lead to organizational benefits. The research model’s hypotheses are tested using a dataset that contains responses from 299 CIO’s, IT managers, and lead architects. Based on this study’s outcomes, we contend that dynamic enterprise architecture capabilities positively enhance firms’ process innovation and business–IT alignment. These mediating forces are both positively associated with organizational benefits. The firms’ EA resources and specifically EA deployment practices are essential in cultivating dynamic enterprise architecture capabilities. This study advances our understanding of how to efficaciously de-lineate dynamic enterprise architecture capabilities in delivering benefits to the organization.