AGILE ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE: A Recombination Perspective

Enterprise architecture (EA) is concerned with the integration and alignment of business and IT infrastructure (Lapalme 2012). It describes an enterprise from an integrated business and IT perspective which helps bridge the communication gap between business and IT stakeholders (Kotusev 2019). EA has long been considered an important cornerstone of stability to enable organizations to function and survive (Richardson et al. 1990; Zachman 1987), and several studies have reported how EA helps to increase IT effectiveness in an organization (Bradley et al. 2012; Foorthuis et al. 2016). In recent years, EA has become even more important for organizations due to rapid technological advancements in big data, the cloud, and the Internet of Things which necessitate new business models (Kotusev 2019). These new scenarios complicate EA processes in organizations by surfacing new complexities that are brought by new methods such as agile methods (Lapalme et al. 2016). EA is generally considered slow moving, and hence it is widely acknowledged that accommodating agile and architectural perspectives can be challenging (Abrahamsson et al. 2010; Chen and Babar 2014; Duijs et al. 2018; Yang et al. 2016).