Content area
Full text
1. Introduction
van der Raadt and van Vliet (2008) describe the CEOs’ ambition to have an effective and successful EA implementation by stating that “the dream of every CEO is to have one standardized, integrated, flexible and manageable landscape of aligned business and IT processes, systems and procedures”; unfortunately, and, however, interestingly they state in the same paper that CEOs do not enjoy the achievement of such a dream: “the reality for many large organizations is quite the opposite”. Researching the reasons of this unpleasant reality is a rich and important research floor that might lead to groundbreaking findings or unleash the paths for more researches and findings.
According to Bente et al. (2012), EA’s main objective is to deliver an enterprise and IT simplifying promise as EA apply architectural thinking to simplify the management of a complex enterprise IT landscape; however, recently it is widely agreed that EA itself struggles from complex processes, and this certainly prevents it from delivering the enterprise and IT simplifying promise as per Bente et al. (2012). Agile Enterprise Architecture (AEA), which is a potential solution for the EA complexity, is witnessing industrial and professional proposals and efforts; however, this is not the situation academically, where the literature reviews indicate that there are few studies on agile enterprise architectures; “literature documenting the agile nature of EA management is scarce; in particular empirical ground is missing” (Hauder et al., 2014) and “The broad range of EA definitions provided in EA literature shows both that the EA discipline is still in an early stage” (Schelp and Stutz, 2007).
2. Research problem
The problem is presented in a form of set of challenges leading to the major problem. We start by discussing the challenge of the change that businesses face nowadays, then we explain the challenge of agility and the challenge of As a Service. After discussing the challenges, we start describing the problem by exploring the agility readiness of the current enterprise architecture and the problem of the enterprise architecture complexity.
2.1 The challenge of change
Gone are the days when business and IT executives considered change as a risk to mitigate or to avoid. Changes in businesses and IT implementations are nowadays part of the business itself; managing businesses...