Toward Understanding Enterprise Architecture Management's Role in Strategic Change: Antecedents, Processes, Outcomes

As organizations face accelerated economic dynamics, it is increasingly important to improve the capability of reacting agile to changes in the marketplace. This requires implementing and adapting internal structures in a timely manner and ensuring business-IT coordination throughout the process. Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is frequently proposed as a mean to arrive at organizational forms that allow for timely reconfiguration and to guide strategy-aligned change. This explorative study seeks to contribute to an overall understanding of EAM’s application in strategic change processes. It is based on an in-depth content analysis of existing research in the field. Specifically, it identifies common EAM practices that have been suggested for application throughout the planning and implementation of strategic change. Furthermore, it reveals antecedents and outcomes of this application. The article discusses these findings in detail and summarizes the results in a preliminary process model of applying EAM for agile strategic change.