Design Principles for Heterogeneity Decisions in Enterprise Architecture Management

Abstract

Adopting an engaged scholarship, particularly design science research approach, we explore design principles for heterogeneity decisions in enterprise architecture management (EAM). The holistic design of an enterprise’s business processes and the architecture of IT systems has been an important IS research topic for many years, but the majority of past studies in our discipline took predominantly a decision-making perspective. There is a significant gap in our current understanding on how to design and plan an EA in order to serve strategic enterprise requirements. Thus, with this research-in-progress we address this gap in the literature and leverage the complementarities between EAM problem domain and design science research knowledge. In particular, we draw upon the latter as a methodological guideline for developing design principles and on the former as a conceptual guideline to develop design principles that address the particular class of heterogeneity problems in EAM.