Enterprise architecture (EA) is widely employed to reduce complexity and to improve business-information technology (IT) alignment. Despite the efforts by practitioners and academics in proposing approaches to smoothen EA development, it is not easy to find a fully successful EA. Because EA development is a complex endeavour, it is important to understand the obstacles that practitioners face during EA development. With the grounded theory, we studied how obstacles during EA development emerged from practitioners' point of view in 15 large enterprises. The study identifies lack of communication and collaboration as the core obstacle that can explain many other obstacles. Communication and collaboration were also harmed by other perceived EA development obstacles, including lack of knowledge and support inside organization and issues imposed by external parties, hesitation in training personnel, setting too ambitious goals, constant change of management, (lack of) clarity in EA development process, lack of budget, forcing personnel to adopt EA, lack of motivation, organizational culture, and organizational structure deficiencies. The lack of communication and collaboration caused several undesired effects to organizations, such as being unable to set common goals and achieve a shared understanding, personnel's distrust, endangered EA governance, lack of innovation capability, lost competitive edge, and ineffective EA outputs. The study highlights that organisations should improve their communication and collaboration before embarking on EA to encounter fewer obstacles. We provide four recommendations for practitioners to improve communication and collaboration in EA development.

Purpose – Constant changes in the environment seem to have become the biggest challenge of a modern enterprise, which emphasizes the constant need to integrate the enterprise into its changing environment. Aiming at eliminating the integration challenges, EA is proposed as a solution. The purpose of this paper is to survey and analyse the available literature on determining the role of EA in EI and also to identify gaps and state-of-the-art in research. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a systematic mapping study that found 50 papers in the intersection of EA and EI, these papers were surveyed, analysed, and classified with respect to research focus, research method, and paper type. Findings – Based on the analyses of the final 50 articles, the authors realized that “EA framework” is the dominating research focus of these studies. “Evaluation research” is recognized as the most common paper type in this area. However, “Experience paper” was a rare paper type in this research domain. “Constructive research” and “Case study/multiple case studies” are widely applied as the research method. “Survey”, “Delphi study” and “Grounded theory” are the least employed research methods. The conclusion was that there is a need for empirical research in this area. After analysing the articles based on their publication year, the authors also noticed a significant growth between 2004 and 2010. After 2010 the number of publications had a downward trend. Originality/value – To the knowledge of the authors, this study is the first systematic literature study regarding the role of EA in EI. There are several systematic literature reviews about the EA or EI separately but none of them has addressed the specific realm of the research. Hence, the goal of this study is to provide a map of existing literature to enable improvement of the practice with the known research results and to identify gaps for future research.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) adoption by governmental organizations has been substantially increased not only to improve performance and efficiency, but as a prerequisite to E-Government implementation. Many efforts have been done to create frameworks and methodologies for government sector organizations to develop EA smoothly and flawlessly. Based on a survey in 2004, governmental organizations in Iran had been among the top ten countries in EA activities but since then it has faced with an ongoing decline. Therefore, the goal of this study is to investigate the obstacles that governmental organizations have encountered in recent years during EA development. Employing multiple case study approach, the data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 9 governmental organizations in Iran. In total, 18 obstacles were identified. Moreover, a priority framework was created to determine the precedence in addressing these obstacles. In analogy to previous literature, five of the identified obstacles have not been mentioned in the earlier literature. This study is a great assist for both practitioners and researchers because of the essentials of digital capability in the success of businesses and EA being the central competence area in digital transformation.

Governmental organizations adopt Enterprise Architecture (EA) not only to enhance their performance and efficiency but also to move toward egovernment implementation. The article at hand investigates the EA development obstacles in governmental organizations. An interpretivist paradigm using the grounded theory methodology (GTM) was selected to carry out this study. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 9 governmental organizations in Iran. In total, 17 obstacles were identified. This study revealed the precedence in addressing EA development obstacles and top management commitment category was identified as a category that has the highest impact on the EA projects. It was realized that the commitment that top management level of the organizations show toward EA development projects, motivates employees to effectively engage with the projects. In addition, a committed top manager assigns adequate resources to the EA project in order to prepare the infrastructure of the company. In this study, government and politics category appeared to be a category of external obstacles that affects most of the other categories directly or indirectly. This study contributes to industry and academia by investigating the EA development obstacles.

Communication and collaboration in Enterprise Architecture (EA) development have always been challenging. This paper contributes to the field of EA by investigating the factors that influence communication and collaboration in EA development. Data was collected from 14 large organizations in various industries regarding their EA development. Adopting the grounded theory method, we identified 20 factors that influence communication and collaboration in EA development and further categorized them into social, technical, internal, and external. Moreover, we analyzed and theorized the relationships between the factors to realize how they influence each other. Analyzing five organizational documents, we provide recommendations to improve communication and collaboration in EA development.