An empirical analysis of the factors and measures of Enterprise Architecture Management success

Abstract

Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is discussed in academia and industry as a vehicle to guide IT implementations, alignment, compliance assessment, or technology management. Still, a lack of knowledge prevails about how EAM can be successfully used, and how positive impact can be realized from EAM. To determine these factors, we identify EAM success factors and measures through literature reviews and exploratory interviews and propose a theoretical model that explains key factors and measures of EAM success. We test our model with data collected from a cross-sectional survey of 133 EAM practitioners. The results confirm the existence of an impact of four distinct EAM success factors, ‘EAM product quality’, ‘EAM infrastructure quality’, ‘EAM service delivery quality’, and ‘EAM organizational anchoring’, and two important EAM success measures, ‘intentions to use EAM’ and ‘Organizational and Project Benefits’ in a confirmatory analysis of the model. We found the construct ‘EAM organizational anchoring’ to be a core focal concept that mediated the effect of success factors such as ‘EAM infrastructure quality’ and ‘EAM service quality’ on the success measures. We also found that ‘EAM satisfaction’ was irrelevant to determining or measuring success. We discuss implications for theory and EAM practice.

Keywords:

• enterprise architecture
• Enterprise Architecture Management
• critical success factors
• PLS
• structural equation modeling

Supplementary Information accompanies this paper on the European Journal of Information Systems website (http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ejis)

Supplementary Information accompanies this paper on the European Journal of Information Systems website (http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ejis)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthias Lange

About the authors

Matthias Lange is an Associate Principal in a leading management consulting firm. He holds a Ph.D. degree from the School of Business and Economics at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on enterprise architecture and business transformations.

Jan Mendling

Jan Mendling is a Full Professor with the Institute for Information Business at Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (WU Vienna), Austria. He has published more than 150 research papers and articles, among others in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering, Information Systems, Data & Knowledge Engineering, and Decision Support Systems.

Jan Recker

Jan Recker is Full Professor and Woolworths Chair of Retail Innovation with Queensland University of Technology. His studies focus on process design practices, IT-enabled business transformations and organizational innovation. His research has appeared in the MIS Quarterly, the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, the European Journal of Information Systems, Information & Management, the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, Information Systems, and other journals. He is an Associate Editor for the Communications of the AIS, a member of the editorial board of several international journals and serves on the program committee of various conferences.