The Changing Value of Enterprise Architecture Capability Maturity

Enterprise architecture (EA) is becoming an important practice for organizations to createthe operational backbone that supports digital strategy (Iansiti and Lakhani, 2019; Ross and Quaadgras, 2012). However, for its importance, EA is also difficult to implement. For some, it is a practice that brings order, clarity, and value, while for others, it is a draining and expensive nuisance (Ross, Weill, & Robertson, 2006). Enterprise architects struggle to show clear benefits of EA and to provide justification for sustained spending on EA (Tamm, Seddon, Shanks, Reynolds, & Frampton, 2015). The result is that EA programs tend to be closed prematurely before they can deliver compelling value (Gong and Janssen, 2019; Ross and Quaadgras, 2012). A reason behind the controversial nature of EA benefits may reside in the limited understanding of EA benefits (Niemi & Pekkola, 2016) and how they change over time (Lange, Mendling, and Recker, 2016). The literature on EA benefits is fairly recent (e.g., Foorthuis, van Steenbergen, Brinkkemper, & Bruls, 2016; Gong & Janssen, 2019; Shanks, Gloet, Someh, Frampton, & Tamm, 2018) and the results have been contradictory (Niemi & Pekkola, 2016). A possible reason may be that the different EA value frameworks do not take a dynamic perspective that recognizes that EA benefits depend on the maturity that an organization has accrued with EA. On this basis, we seek to answer the following research question: How do the perceived benefits of EA evolve with the maturity of EA capabilities in organizations?To contribute to the ongoing debate about dynamics of the business value of EA, we have conducted a longitudinal case study at GMEM, a global electronics manufacturer where we followed the evolution of the EA practice. Our analysis shows that EA capability produces benefits that go hand in hand with the maturation of the capability itself hence proving that benefit expectations for EA need to be timed according to the maturity of the EA capability.