Enterprise architecture to enhance organizational agility? An exploratory study

Abstract

Contemporary organisations experience an increasing pressure to change. This requires organisational agility, i.e. the ability to sense and respond continuously to changes in the environment. To support this unprecedented challenge, Enterprise Architecture has been proposed as an architectural and organisational foundation. This is a rather grand promise. In this exploratory study we discuss the usefulness of the approach, building on the framework of Ross et.al. Our research question is, to what degree can medium sized organisations use EA to build organisational agility? Our empirical evidence is a case study with four medium sized Norwegian organisations. We find that the adoption of EA principles is contingent and pragmatic, and that maturity levels are generally low. We find reasonable support for the assumption that EA is actually increasing organisational agility, in particular the capability to respond to external changes.