The Role of Enterprise Architecture in Building and Sustaining Information Technology – Enabled Organizational Agility

Abstract

To survive in a dynamic environment, an organization must possess the ability to swiftly sense changes and (re)deploy reconfigurable resources in response to the changes (i.e., organizational agility). The literature suggests information technology (IT) can enable and constrain organizational agility, making IT-enabled organizational agility usually fleeting. Drawing on a systematic review of 43 articles and on organizational agility theories, this study identifies two main roles that EA can play in building and sustaining IT-enabled organizational agility. First, EA can endow IT-enabled resources with architectural properties that make them reconfigurable. Second, EA process practices provide the ability to form, continually improve, and redeploy reconfigurable IT-enabled resources in response to emerging changes. The architecture properties and EA process practices, together with their implications are discussed. This study contributes to clarifying the link between EA and IT-enabled organizational agility and to explaining how EA can help build and sustain IT-enabled organizational agility.