Theory Foundations for Enterprise Architecture Management: Insights from Infrastructure-Related Economics

Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is a highly relevant topic in organizational practice and design science research. However, the constant need for investigating EAM's benefits and for justifying its costs has not satisfactorily been dealt with. Traditional business case based justifications fall short in considering the cross-project, cross-unit, and enterprise wide character of EAM. Because of EAM's infrastructure-like nature, we survey economic theory for approaches explaining cost and benefit effects of EAM and to discuss their potential to derive implications for EAM design. The paper is a first attempt to bring together different bodies of knowledge in two diverse fields (IS and economics). Findings are theories that explain why infrastructure-like concepts are necessary and further hints for in-depth analysis that is supposed to lead to meaningful insights for EAM design. Based on the discussed economic theories, we compile a research agenda in the area of infrastructure-like systems.