Areas Where Enterprise Architecture Contributes to Organizational Goals – A Quantitative Study in The Netherlands

Nowadays, many organizations have adopted an agile way of working where agile teams are responsible for the architecture, design and implementation of transformations in business processes. To get some recent empirical data on how this influences the value of EA as perceived in organizations, a survey has been created based on the Enterprise Architecture Value Framework (EAVF), a model to categorize value items. The survey has been distributed among (enterprise) architects and stakeholders of EA. Only small differences were found between the answers of these groups and the overall picture is that the respondents find the contribution of EA (average) important. A more detailed exploration of the outcomes shows that in areas which have a long-standing tradition with EA such as compliance, risk prevention, data management and information systems, the contribution of EA is perceived as (very) important, while in areas such as sustainability, market strategy and technology research the contribution of EA is assessed as less important. The results also suggest that the maturity of the EA processes can be improved.