Stakeholder engagement in enterprise architecture practice: What inhibitors are there?
Introduction
The current epoch of digital business transformation compels organizations to rethink their attitude towards IT [73, 162, 163]. The recent developments of technology are not only modifying established business models, but also continually creating new opportunities for many companies to innovate [129, 160, 164]. These profound shifts in the competitive business environment inspired by digitization magnify the importance of achieving tighter business and IT alignment in organizations [99]. Alignment leads to numerous benefits for organizations including increased agility [146], financial business performance [52, 53] and overall organizational success [27, 105, 165].
Enterprise architecture (EA) is a collection of documents, typically called artifacts and consisting of various models, describing different aspects of an organization from an integrated business and IT perspective1 [79, 116]. EA intends to bridge the communication gap between business and IT stakeholders, facilitate information systems planning and thereby improve business and IT alignment [79, 117, 147].
EA practice is an organizational activity that implies using EA artifacts for facilitating decision-making and improving business and IT alignment [1, 77, 114]. EA practice includes defining an overarching strategic direction and moving towards this direction through implementing specific initiatives [1, 77, 130]. Participants of EA practices in organizations range from C-level executives to project teams [78, 116, 151].
EA practices have multiple diverse success factors, e.g. quality of EA artifacts, organizational anchoring and tool support [67, 89, 169]. Besides those factors, effective EA practices require achieving engagement between architects2 and other EA stakeholders [4, 47, 98]. On the one hand, different facets of engagement (e.g. communication, collaboration and partnership) are consistently found among the most critical success factors of EA practice [5, 19, 133, 151]. On the other hand, among various problems associated with EA practices [2, 32, 86], the challenges related specifically to establishing engagement can be considered as the most common and acute ones [11, 28, 60].
However, although the importance of strong engagement between architects and other EA stakeholders is widely recognized and the lack of engagement is acknowledged as a major issue [11], the very notion of engagement received only limited attention in the existing EA literature [4, 98] and the problem of achieving engagement in EA practice has never been intentionally studied. In order to address this gap, this study explores various inhibitors of engagement between architects and other stakeholders in EA practice.
Based on a revelatory in-depth case study of a troublesome EA practice and a grounded theory-based analysis approach, we identify a number of factors undermining engagement between architects and EA stakeholders, join these factors into a holistic theoretical model and classify them into a two-dimensional analytical framework according to their relative novelty and specificity to the studied organization. The resulting theoretical model conceptualizes the problem of achieving engagement in EA practice and explains the relationship between different direct and indirect negative factors complicating engagement. Our study contributes to theory via proposing the first explicit conceptualization of the engagement problem as well as to practice by means of providing a “checklist” of potential issues to watch for.
This paper continues as follows: (1) we discuss EA practice and its stakeholders, the notion of engagement, two different types of engagement and motivation for this research, (2) we describe the research design, data collection and analysis procedures, (3) we present the set of identified inhibitors of engagement and the resulting theoretical model, (4) we discuss our findings in light of the existing EA literature, (5) we conclude the paper, describe the theoretical and practical contribution of our study, outline its limitations and propose directions for future research.
Section snippets
Literature review
In this section, we define EA practice and the notion of engagement between architects and EA stakeholders. Then, we discuss the importance of effective engagement, two different types of engagement in the context of EA practice and problems related to EA practice. Lastly, we explain in detail the study motivation and the research question of this study.
Research method
This study is qualitative, inductive and exploratory in nature because the question under investigation is arguably not described in the EA literature well enough to formulate any reasonable deductive propositions or quantitative hypotheses. For this reason, we selected the case study research method as the most suitable approach for studying qualitatively a contemporary, but insufficiently explored phenomenon in its full complexity and natural settings [39, 96, 167]. We focused specifically on
Research findings
In this section, we describe the studied organization, discuss the identified direct inhibitors of strategic and initiative-based engagement as well as the indirect aggravating factors influencing engagement, and finally present the resulting theoretical model explaining the problem of achieving engagement.
Discussion of findings
This exploratory study focuses on the notion of engagement as one of the core issues of EA practice, which undeservingly received only limited attention in the existing EA literature. It aims to deepen our understanding of engagement in EA practice and explicitly distinguishes between strategic engagement, as the interaction of business leaders and architects, and initiative-based engagement, as the interaction of architects and project teams, due to their disparate nature (see Table 1). The
Conclusion
In the epoch of “total digitization” [159] EA, as a proven means for linking business and IT, can be viewed as an essential tool in the organizational toolkit necessary for implementing innovative digital business models and strategies [127, 129]. Digital transformation is fueled by ubiquitous digital information, virtually unlimited connectivity and massive processing capacity and is closely associated with such technologies as social networks, mobile devices, analytics, cloud and the Internet
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Australian Research Council for funding this study (DP14010024). We are grateful to Dr. Keith Frampton for organizing initial access to the case organization. We also appreciate the case study participants’ on-going support for our research.
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