Consolidating Enterprise Architecture Management Research

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a description of an enterprise from an integrated business and IT perspective. Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a management practice of using EA aiming to achieve business/IT alignment. Popular EA literature states that EA always includes a documentation of current and future states of enterprises and describes EAM as an iterative step-wise process. However, plenty of evidence suggests that the real situation in EA practice and theory is much more diverse but a consolidated understanding of EAM is absent. In this paper we consolidate EAM research and present (1) a reasonable definition of EA taking into account all that we know about EA practice and (2) a consolidated view of EAM describing what we know about it beyond the most popular approaches. We also discuss the relationship between our consolidated view of EAM and the previous research, its implications and directions for future research.