Designing Enterprise Architecture Management Functions - The Interplay of Organizational Contexts and Methods

Enterprise architecture (EA) management is today a critical success factor for enterprises that have to survive in a continually changing environment. The embracing nature of the management subject and the variety of concrete goals that enterprises seek to pursue with EA management raises the need for management functions tailored to the specific demands of the using organization. The majority of existing approaches to EA management does account for the organization-specificity of their implementation, while concrete prescriptions on how to adapt an EA management function are scarce. In this paper we present a development method for organization-specific EA management functions based on the idea of reusable building blocks. A building block describes a practice-proven solution to a recurring EA management problem. The theoretic exposition of the development method is complemented by an fictitious application example.