Achieving Enterprise Architecture Benefits: What Makes the Difference?

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is rapidly becoming an established discipline. However, this does not mean that the practice of EA is already fully standardized. Practitioners as well as researchers report various techniques being used in the EA practice. And although EA has various potential benefits, evidence of real benefits is only just emerging. This paper presents empirical evidence of the relations between EA techniques used and EA benefits perceived, as well as the influence of contextual factors. The evidence is based on the results of a survey (n=293) held among both architects and stakeholders of EA in a wide variety of organizations. Employing multivariate regression analysis we found that the combination of project compliance, EA choices being explicitly linked to business goals and organized knowledge exchange between architects is a strong predictor for EA being perceived as a good instrument. We also established that significant differences exist in EA practice effectiveness between different economic sectors. Government appears to reap less benefits from EA than other sectors. The empirical evidence furthermore shows only a small influence of organizational size and number of architects on EA effectiveness.