Language Communities in Enterprise Architecture Research

As a result of the rigor vs. relevance debate, researchers who focus on design research on organizational problems are beginning to focus on their research methodology's rigor. One of the means to lever the standards is the explicit establishment of defined language communities. This paper investigates to what extent current design research focusing on organizational problems is satisfying the requirements to establish such language communities. As research on organizational problems in IS research is still a very broad field, this paper focuses on research on enterprise architecture (EA). It contributes a state of the art overview on EA research regarding the research methodology employed and their language community state. Results show that local language communities in EA research do exist, but still have to lever their standards-both regarding the quality of the language communities and the quality of the design research.