Geographically Distributed Enterprise Architecting: Towards a Theoretical Framework

Enterprise architecting is becoming critical for most modern organizations whose competitive strategies are tightly linked to the underlying information technology (IT) infrastructure. The reason for this is that an enterprise architecture takes a holistic view of the business processes and functions and the information technologies supporting them, rather than the more detailed perspectives provided with application-by-application views. Our understanding of effective enterprise architecting activities is still evolving and this practice is replete with challenges. These challenges are further compounded by the fact that organizations are often geographically dispersed. Furthermore, business processes, technology infrastructure components, information and the people involved may be distributed in different geographic configurations, making it very difficult to comprehend their organization. In this article, we make a first attempt at providing a theoretical framework to guide our thinking for practice and research in this area. We build on the foundations of coordination theory and geographically distributed collaboration research.