Hybrid Coordination in Enterprise Architecture Management

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) has long been propagated in research and practice as an approach for keeping local information systems (IS) investments in line with enterprise-wide, long-term objectives. Extant EAM literature pre-dominantly promotes strictly centralized coordination mechanisms to achieve the promised alignment contributions. Notwithstanding the increasing maturity levels in practice, organizations still struggle with the successful establishment of EAM, mainly due to the shortcomings of a firmly centralized coordination approach in complex organizational settings. This discussion paper aims at a distinctive theorization of EAM, which goes beyond its pre-dominant, merely centralized approaches, i.e. to explain performance contributions and successful EAM establishment as a hybrid product of centralized and non-centralized coordination mechanisms. To this end, a descriptive model shall be afforded, also explaining the hybrid distinctions of the adopted mechanisms.