Institutionalization and the Effectiveness of Enterprise Architecture Management

Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) has become a prominent discipline for managing increasingly complex Business/IT relationships in organizations. The more tangible aspects of EAM like modeling, planning, principles or governance structures are widely discussed and understood. However, institutionalizing EAM in an organization remains a challenging issue. Therefore, actually realized EAM benefits can be observed to vary widely across organizations. To address these issues, we take an institutional theory perspective and propose nine hypotheses which are tested based on quantitative empirical data. Our findings confirm seven institutional factors as antecedents for institutionalizing EAM in terms of positive stakeholder response, EA consistency and a realization of EAM benefits for the organization. Our research supports the understanding of the relevant phenomenon of institutionalization of EAM as a rather practice-driven discipline, where theoretical foundations as well as research into non-technical issues are limited so far.