Elements and characteristics of enterprise architecture capabilities

Abstract

Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is expected to contribute to strategic planning and systematic development of enterprises by capturing the essential structures and processes of an enterprise on different architectural levels (e.g. business, data, application, technology) and showing inter-dependencies. Capabilities in EAM are among the subjects in research which have received substantial attention during the last years, but still are not thoroughly defined regarding their characteristics, elements and lifecycle processes. Many different definitions of the term capability exist and different views on what the elements of capabilities are have been presented. The main contributions of the paper are (a) an analysis and discussion of the literature on capabilities in EAM, (b) a conceptualization of EAM capability identifying the core elements and characteristics, and (c) the results of expert interviews for validating this conceptualization.