Architectural Coordination of Transformation: Implications from Game Theory

Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is considered a means to support coordination in enterprises. However, coordination between heterogeneous stakeholder groups with different interests is a challenging task to achieve. In this paper, we take a game-theoretic perspective on coordination in organizations. We identify three coordination games from literature: (1) Matching game, (2) Battle of the sexes game, and (3) Assurance game. For each game, we then provide an example and discuss which EAM deliverables can be employed to support coordination and which implications for the design of EAM can be derived. From the analysis of coordination games, we derive a proposition outlining further EAM evolution along two paths: as an active decision support discipline, but keeping its focus in the IT domain; or moving out of the IT departments and becoming a strategic decision support discipline for enterprise transformation.