The impact of enterprise architecture management on information systems architecture complexity
Type
journal article
Date Issued
2023-11
Author(s)
Research Team
IWI1
Abstract
Significant investments in information systems (IS) over the past decades have led to increasingly complex IS architectures in organisations, which are difficult to understand, operate, and maintain. We investigate this development and associated challenges through a conceptual model that distinguishes four constituent elements of IS architecture complexity by differentiating technological from organisational aspects and structural from dynamic aspects. Building on this conceptualisation, we hypothesise relations between these four IS architecture complexity constructs and investigate their impact on architectural outcomes (i.e., efficiency, flexibility, transparency, and predictability). Using survey data from 249 IS managers, we test our model through a partial least squares (PLS) approach to structural equation modelling (SEM). We find that organisational complexity drives technological complexity and that structural complexity drives dynamic complexity. We also demonstrate that increasing IS architecture complexity has a significant negative impact on efficiency, flexibility, transparency, and predictability. Finally, we show that enterprise architecture management (EAM) helps to offset these negative effects by acting as a moderator in the relation between organisational and technological IS architecture complexity. Thus, organisations without adequate EAM are likely to face large increases in technological complexity due to increasing organisational complexity, whereas organisations with adequate EAM exhibit no such relation.
Language
English
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
HSG Profile Area
SoM - Business Innovation
Refereed
Yes
Volume
32
Number
6
Start page
1070
End page
1090
Subject(s)
Eprints ID
268166