Abstract:

Organizations have to react to the accelerating changes and complexity of their environment to survive in future. They call for higher flexibility and operational efficiency that is in fact the key contribution of enterprise architecture according to its definition. Enterprise architecture provides supportive instruments to manage an organizational change on both business and information technology sides. Unfortunately, many enterprise architecture activities do not contribute to an organization performance, frequently by reason of insufficient understanding of the organization needs or complexity. This paper proposes an extension of standard enterprise architecture practices through the utilization of organizational complexity and strategic resources theories, which can betterexplain the organization’s situation and focus the enterprise architecture accordingly.