Method and practical guidelines for overcoming enterprise architecture adoption challenges

Abstract

During the last few years, interest towards Enterprise Architecture (EA) has increased, not least due to anticipated benefits resulting from adopting it. For instance, EA has been argued to provide cost reduction, technology standardisation, process improvement, and strategic differentiation. Despite these benefits, the EA adoption rate and maturity are still low. Consequently, EA benefits are not realised. A major reason hindering the adoption is that EA is not understood correctly. This paper aims for minimising the effect of the lack of understanding EA to adopting EA. Based on the research conducted in Finnish public sector, we propose an improved Enterprise Architecture Adoption Method (EAAM) to overcome the EA adoption challenges. EAAM is built using Design Science approach and evaluated using Delphi method. Some practical guidelines for applying EAAM are also provided to help organisations to overcome EA adoption challenges.