Goals in Enterprise Architecture Management -- Findings from Literature and Future Research Directions

The Management of Enterprise Architectures (EAM) is an evolving discipline within the information systems community. By taking a holistic point of view on an enterprise, considering its business and Information Technology (IT) elements, EAM aims at a better alignment of business and IT, cost savings and faster response times. In order to achieve those benefits academics as well as industry representatives already provide methods, models and tools. Nevertheless, researchers and practitioners call for means to demonstrate the payoff of EAM initiatives. A common management approach for explicitly tracking an individual´s or team´s performance and success relies on the definition of goals. To the authors´ knowledge such an approach is not yet established within the EAM discipline. To improve this shortfall, this paper gives an overview on the current body of knowledge in the field of goals in EAM by means of an extensive literature study. Based on the analysis´ results we present reoccurring properties of goals in EAM, possible interrelations and an initial classification. The paper concludes by providing topics for future research directions.