Ea Configurations: Interplay of EA Design Factors, Strategy Types, and Environments

Since late 1990’s, organizations have been increasingly implementing enterprise architecture (EA) to address the problems of fragmented systems of processes, applications, data, and technologies. Despite this growing adoption of EA, there has been little academic research that provides compelling empirical evidence of the impact of EA on organizational performance and prescriptive design principles for EA. As a result, scholars and practitioners are not well informed about the business value of EA as well as about effective design approaches to EA. We argue that the lack of strong empirical evidence is partly and importantly due to the complexity of EA configurations and to the limitations of the traditional correlation-based methods used for uncovering the complex causal relationships between heterogeneous EA configurations and organizational performance. This research intends to examine how EA elements combine with organizational and environmental elements to produce high organizational performance and to suggest ways to design effective EA configurations. We propose that it is the holistic dynamics of the EA design factors and organizational and environmental elements that determine the impact of EA on organizational performance. First, based on the EA literature we define four EA design factors such as centralization, modularity, standardization, and open platforms, which represent crucial decisions an enterprise architect should make. Then, with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), an emerging set-theoretic configurational methodology, we analyze empirical field data to examine multiple EA configurations that have different structures but result in the same outcome. Especially, we focus on explaining how the EA design factors play different roles over the multiple equifinal configurations in achieving high organizational performance while interacting with organizational and environmental factors. Based on the fsQCA findings, we develop design principles for implementing effective enterprise architecture in terms of the four EA design factors.