Coordination and Governance in Geographically Distributed Enterprise Architecting: An Empirical Research Design

Previous research examining the effective implementation and management of enterprise architecture (EA) has typically used a governance perspective. However, this perspective does not consider the challenges associated with the “architecting” effort—i.e., the processes involved in generating and managing the EA. This requires the coordinated action of many stakeholders and architects, especially when they are geographically dispersed because distance and time barriers need to be bridged to coordinate their efforts. In this paper we adapt a previously suggested architecting coordination framework to develop a research model that integrates the coordination and governance perspectives in order to examine the development and implementation of effective geographically dispersed EAs. We use data obtained from two practitioner workshops on EA and follow up interviews with two participants to do some preliminary analysis. We then propose an empirical research design to study our proposed research framework in greater detail.