The Contribution of Enterprise Architecture to
the Achievement of Organizational Goals:
A Review of the Evidence
Vasilis Boucharas
1
, Marlies van Steenbergen
2
, Slinger Jansen
1
, and Sjaak
Brinkkemper
1
1
Department of Information & Computing Sciences, Utrecht University,
Padualaan 14, 3584CH Utrecht, The Netherlands,
vboucharas@gmail.com
2
Architecture & Business Solutions, Sogeti Netherlands B.V., Postbus 76,
4130 EB Vianen, The Netherlands
Summary. This paper reports the findings of a systematic review on
the literature concerning the potential contribution of Enterprise Archi-
tecture (EA) to the achievement of various business goals. The review
revealed the current state of the scientific and practitioner's literature
concerning the potential benefits of EA as describing 29 unique contexts
within which EA has been found to deliver 100 unique benefits through
3 value-generative mechanisms. This review enhances the understanding
of EA of both researchers and practitioners by providing valuable in-
formation on the potential benefits of EA and their relationships, their
applicability (context), and the mechanisms that generate them. Addi-
tionally, this review is expected to enable practitioners to establish the
business case for EA by means of scientifically grounded reasoning about
how EA might contribute to the achievement of certain business goals.
Key words: enterprise architecture, organizational goals, systematic re-
view
1 Introduction
Although considered to be relatively young [1, 2, 3], Enterprise Architecture
(EA) has generally evolved into a well-accepted discipline [3] and its importance
is considered to be growing [1]. Curiously enough, to date, there exists no single
comprehensive view of the ways EA might add value to an organization. This
carries several implications:
Firstly, it inhibits establishing a common understanding, among practitioners
and researchers alike, of the potential of EA as a discipline and how it may
lead to desirable organizational outcomes [4]. As a consequence, comparisons to
other, already established business governance instruments become difficult and
ambiguity is introduced over the specific value proposition of EA.
Secondly, it inhibits the establishment of the business case for EA due to
the difficulty of demonstrating the business value of the project at hand. Slot,

2 Vasilis Boucharas et al.
Dedene, and Maes find it surprising that to a large extent, the business case for
the current EA activities that take place in the business and IT world is non-
existent [5]. Increasingly, traditional cost-justification methods are found to be
inappropriate for measuring the contribution of IS/IT investments in general [6].
More specifically, quantifying the value of EA is considered to be a challenge [2, 7]
and research strictly focusing on financial benefits is considered to represent a
very limited view [3]. The alternative is to make use of contribution-justification.
In this respect though, the absence of a comprehensive, scientifically grounded
framework of potential EA benefits inhibits establishing the business case for
EA. Finally, it inhibits the establishment of standardized and reusable technical
EA effectiveness metrics since the entire breadth of the indirect effects of EA is
not known.
Although on the whole the (mostly practitioner-oriented) literature displays
an abundance of potential EA benefits, these are mostly inconsistently scientifi-
cally grounded [4]. Even in those cases that the EA benefits are consistently and
scientifically grounded, they are usually presented as being under the direct in-
fluence of the architectural practice, lacking any justification as far as the cause
and effect relationships between them, the EA practice, and the ultimate busi-
ness goals are concerned. However, Steenbergen and Brinkkemper [3] conducted
several relevant exploratory case studies and found that in reality, the nature
and complexity of the cause and effect relationships occurring between multiple
differencing benefits is far more indirect and complicated.
In this first in a series of upcoming research papers reporting on the estab-
lishment of a comprehensive, scientifically grounded framework of potential EA
benefits, we present a systematic review of the evidence regarding the effective-
ness of EA. With the goal of researching not only the benefits of EA, but equally
important, the cause and effect relationship chains between them, and in order
to maximize the richness and depth of the analysis of the evidence, we apply
the design-oriented research synthesis method proposed by Denyer et al. [8], an
extension of Pawson's realist synthesis method [9]. Using this method we extract
design propositions (or technological rules [10]) in the lines of the Context Inter-
vention Mechanism Outcome (CIMO) logic [8]. For Aken, a technological rule is
a fragment of general knowledge (or general solution) that in a specific field of
application links an intervention or an artifact with some expected outcome or
performance [11]. Denyer et al. similarly see a design proposition as offering a
general template for creating solutions for a specific class of problems [8].
A design proposition made up of CIMO-logic components is formed in princi-
ple as follows: for some problematic Context(s), use some specific Intervention(s)
that will invoke some generative Mechanism(s) that in turn will deliver the de-
sired Outcome(s). Design propositions thus not only inform on what to do in a
specific situation in order to create a specific effect but more importantly, they
offer some insight on why it happens [8].
In Section 2 we describe the literature review methodology. In Section 3 we
present the findings of the review in terms of Context, Mechanism and Outcome
elements as well as by applying a model, the Enterprise Architecture Benefits