Enterprise Architecture Assimilation: An Institutional Perspective

Enterprise architecture (EA) has long been propagated in information systems research as an approach for guiding diverse local stakeholders toward a common holistic perspective. Despite its maturation over the past decades, organizations still encounter institutional obstacles with realizing EA’s intended outcomes. Literature addressing this challenge mainly understands EA as an exogenous phenomenon that needs to be brought into the organization. In the paper at hand, we aim to go one step further. We focus on EA assimilation by studying the influence of institutional pressures that make EA part of the organization’s worklife and thus contribute to EA’s intended outcomes. By capturing all institutional pressures through which EA may become an inherent part of the organization’s worklife, we empirically confirm their influence on EA assimilation and EA outcomes. In addition, we find the engagement of local organizational stakeholders to sig-nificantly mediate the relation between institutional pressures and EA assimilation.