Current Challenges and Opportunities in Enterprise Architecture: Insights from 950 + LeanIX Customers

Abstract

Data-driven architecture is a new paradigm promoted by LeanIX that focuses on making Enterprise Architecture accessible to a wider audience of stakeholders in organizations, to increase data quality and provide transparency when undergoing organizational transformations. This democratization of Enterprise Architecture allows organizations to transform faster and take advantage of trends such as the API Economy, Software-as-a-Service, and Citizen Developers with low-code applications. From this perspective, in this paper, we present the most common challenges that organizations face in their Enterprise Architecture practice due to siloed information and lack of communication between stakeholders. Furthermore, using tools like Excel and PowerPoint to manage the architecture poses challenges due to obsolete data, inability to create meaningful analyses and having multiple sources of truth. In the case of C&A, Helvetia and Marc O’Polo we present how having a modern data-driven Enterprise Architecture has helped these organizations with addressing their challenges and transforming quickly. Finally, we present our ideas on avenues for advancing the field of Enterprise Architecture from a research and practice perspective.