The Role of Group Cognition in Enterprise Architecting

Enterprise architecture (EA) models the desired relationships between business processes and technology. Enterprise "architecting" is the process of developing and maintaining the EA. The goal of EA is to align business process and IT for the effective execution of business strategy and the efficient implementation of the associated systems. Thus, the architecting process involves many stakeholders (e.g., architects, IT staff, and business staff) with very diverse perspectives, making coordination of architecting work daunting. Despite their critical importance to EA success, coordination and governance in EA have received very little attention in the literature. In this paper we report on a study based on semi-structured interviews of CIO\´s, chief architects, technical architects, IT staff, business stakeholders and EA consultants. The focus of the study was to better understand the coordination challenges and best practices leading to EA success. Our results show that various forms of group cognition play a critical role in the effective coordination of architecting.