On the Changing Role of Enterprise Architecture in Decentralized Environment: State of the Art

International audienceThe problem of business-IT alignment is of vital significance for modern enterprises. Solving it allows all components of an enterprise to operate together in a collaborative manner for the purpose of maximizing overall benefit to the enterprise. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a discipline that aims to surmount mismatches of business and IT in a holistic manner from the ground up through proper design. Decentralization of organizations and subsequent change of their management and operation style requires major changes in organization processes and heavily involves the IT. This paper demonstrates, however, that EA is primarily aimed at centralized organizational structures, and as such has shortcomings when being applied to decentralized organizations. Overcoming these deficiencies requires some new principles to be introduced and incorporated into EA knowledge. Relevant sources for these new principles are decentralized organizations, peer-to-peer technologies, and organizational science. All these areas have tackled the problem of decentralization in certain ways. This paper presents prevalent decentralization principles, and how they have the potential to be applied to EA