Academics and practitioners have made various claims regarding the benefits that Enterprise Architecture (EA) delivers for both individual projects and the organization as a whole. At the same time, there is a lack of explanatory theory regarding how EA delivers these benefits. Moreover, EA practices and benefits have not been extensively investigated by empirical research, with especially quantitative studies on the topic being few and far between. This paper therefore presents the statistical findings of a theory-building survey study (n=293). The resulting PLS model is a synthesis of current implicit and fragmented theory, and shows how EA practices and intermediate benefits jointly work to help the organization reap benefits for both the organization and its projects. The model shows that EA and EA practices do not deliver benefits directly, but operate through intermediate results, most notably compliance with EA and architectural insight. Furthermore, the research identifies the EA practices that have a major impact on these results, the most important being compliance assessments, management propagation of EA, and different types of knowledge exchange. The results also demonstrate that projects play an important role in obtaining benefits from EA, but that they generally benefit less than the organization as a whole.

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Abstract. Organizational compliance with laws, industrial standards, procedures and enterprise architectures has become a highly relevant topic for both practitioners and academics. However, both the fundamental insights into compliance as a concept and the tactics for bringing an organization into a compliant state have been described in a fragmented manner. Using literature from various disciplines, this paper presents two contributions. First, it describes the fundamental concepts regarding compliance. Second, it presents a framework in which the various tactics for achieving organizational compliance can be positioned.

This article examines how to assess projects, which implement business processes and IT systems, on compliance with an Enterprise Architecture (EA) that provides them with constraints and high-level solutions. The authors begin by presenting the core elements of EA compliance testing. Next, the authors discuss the testing process and four types of compliance checks (i.e., correctness check, justification check, consistency check, and completeness check). Finally, an empirical case is reported in which a real-life project has been tested on conformance, demonstrating and evaluating the authors’ approach. The results indicate that objective compliance testing cannot be taken for granted. Therefore, several suggestions are presented to decrease the subjectivity of assessments, such as operationalization of EA prescriptions.