Designing enterprise architectures based on systems theoretic stability

Contemporary organizations are operating in increasingly volatile environments. Hence, organizations must be agile in order to be able to quickly adapt to changes in its environment. Given the increasing complexity of organizations, it has been argued that organizations should be purposefully designed. Enterprise architecture frameworks provide guidance for the design of organizational structures. Unfortunately, current enterprise architecture frameworks have a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive nature and do not seem to have a strong theoretical foundation. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of extending the prescriptive design principles of the Normalized Systems theory to the field of enterprise architecture. Our results show that such approach is feasible and illustrate how the systems theoretic concept of stability can be used on the organizational level.