Purpose of Enterprise Architecture Management: Investigating Tangible Benefits in the German Logistics Industry

Following up a discussion during TEAR 2018 the paper at hands presents the results of a study for identifying tangible benefits expected from Enterprise Architecture in a corporate environment. There is a plethora of text books and papers available, but they rather address general or high-level benefits like transparency, alignment (strategic or between business and IT, planning (strategic, tactical or operational). These are often not addressing specific concerns within a company so that they seem to be abstract. This paper summarizes the feedback provided by Enterprise Architects and decision makers from the logistics industry. This feedback has been collected by performing individual interviews during which interviewees should provide typical questions that EA is expected to answer in their respective environment. These questions represent an intermediate result towards a more general catalogue of concrete concerns. These are supposed to enable the design of a lightweight methodology for Enterprise Architecture Management focusing on solving immediate issues.