Abstract
M.Phil. (Engineering Management)
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a young discipline within the Computer Engineering field and its main aim is to align information technology to the strategic goals of a business. For this reason, various organisations are increasingly starting to employ enterprise architecture with the main expected benefit being bridging the gap between business and technology.
Despite the significant interest in the discipline, research indicates many Enterprise Architecture initiatives within organisations are often confronted with substantial challenges. If such challenges are not overcome, Enterprise Architecture projects fail and the expected value and benefits are not realized.
Majority of organisations continue to introduce technology to their day-to-day activities and therefore the alignment of technology to strategic goals of organisations remains crucial for achieving a competitive advantage and business success.
Literature review suggests that various areas of Enterprise Architecture have been researched in isolation either per sector and/or in some cases per challenge. This study aims at investigating existing Enterprise Architecture challenges holistically and will provide an overall picture to the reader on the challenges encountered during Enterprise Architecture implementation.
A systematic literature review was carried out, 1060 papers were retrieved from 6 databases through a manual search. 354 studies remained after the duplicates were eliminated and 60 studies were found to be eligible after screening through titles and abstracts. Only 16 studies were included in the final pool after screening through full text.
The study concludes that challenges do exist during the implementation of Enterprise Architecture projects. Furthermore the study provides evidence that the majority of challenges are non-technical by nature. Recommendations in overcoming the top 5 challenges are given and further research that will examine such recommendations in detail is proposed.