The Benefits of Enterprise Architecture in Organizational Transformation
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RESEARCH PAPER
The Benefits of Enterprise Architecture in Organizational Transformation Eetu Niemi • Samuli Pekkola
Received: 31 July 2018 / Accepted: 3 May 2019 The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Today, as organizations constantly adjust their activities to meet ever-changing circumstances, continuous business transformation is taking place. However, planning and steering this transformation can be a daunting task as complexity has been built into the organization over the years. Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been widely adapted as a planning and governance approach to manage the complexity and constant change, and to align the organization toward a common goal. This article studies the EA benefit-realization process by clarifying how EA benefits are realized. Specifically, the focus is on the strategies, resources, and practices which the EA benefits stem from. The findings, derived from an in-depth case study, show that the EA benefit-realization process constitutes a long, intertwined chain of activities. Organizations benefit from EA through various means: from the initiation, when comprehensive understanding starts to form, until years later, when measurable outcomes such as cost savings materialize. Suggestions on what to incorporate into EA programs are presented.
Accepted after one revision by Jelena Zdravkovic.
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-019-00605-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. E. Niemi (&) Coala Ltd, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] S. Pekkola Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected]
Keywords Enterprise architecture Organizational transformation Benefit-realization process Value Case study
1 The Need for Enterprise Architecture In today’s volatile business environment, organizations constantly adjust their activities to the changing circumstances—business transformation1 is continuously taking place. However, with the long legacy of organizational activities, processes, and IT development, planning and steering the transformation can be a daunting task as complexity has been built into the organization over the years. The organizations often lack a clear overall view of their business functions, processes, information systems (IS), and individual technical platforms, such as servers and databases, and of their mutual dependencies. This makes it difficult to execute the transformation initiatives in the most beneficial way. As a result, business and IT improvement often takes place in silos, without comprehensively considering the organizational viewpoint and transformation as a whole. Transformation projects overrunning their budgets and schedules, unable to reach the overall goals, are all too familiar examples of this challenge (Bloch et al. 2012). Traditional transformation approaches such as strategic planning, process improvement, IT governance, and program management are, on their own, unable to
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