EA CONFIGURATIONS: INTERPLAY OF EA DESIGN FACTORS, STRATEGY TYPES, AND ENVIRONMENTS Research-in-Progress

Since late 1990’s, organizations have been increasingly implementing enterprise architecture (EA) to address the problems of fragmented systems of processes, applications, data, and technologies. Despite this growing adoption of EA, there has been little academic research that provides compelling empirical evidence of the impact of EA on organizational performance and prescriptive design principles for EA. As a result, scholars and practitioners are not well informed about the business value of EA as well as about effective design approaches to EA. We argue that the lack of strong empirical evidence is partly and importantly due to the complexity of EA configurations and to the limitations of the traditional correlation-based methods used for uncovering the complex causal relationships between heterogeneous EA configurations and organizational performance. This research intends to examine how EA elements combine with organizational and environmental elements to produce high organizational performance and to suggest ways to design effective EA configurations. We propose that it is the holistic dynamics of the EA design factors and organizationa