Sustainable Alignment in Enterprise Architecture: A Case Study of Architectural Principles

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has emerged as the preeminent means to change and transform large organizations. By employing architectural principles, organizations strive to master the complexity inherent in business processes and information system and their alignment. Despite the fact that Business-IT alignment has been a top concern for practitioners and researchers for years, the emergent nature of alignment in EA has rarely been taken into consideration. Even if different approaches focus on business IT alignment, most of them have a tendency to focus on alignment as a state or a process by focusing on strategy or organizational issues. Moreover, very few existing EA Frameworks give clear guidance on how to design and manage these alignment issues. In this paper we argue that the choice of architectural principles has an impact on the ability to achieve and maintain sustainable EA alignment in a dynamic business context. A case study is used as a basis for the analysis.

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