be simply defined as a plan how an organisation
makes money (Lewis, 1999). Although it is not called
a business architecture, that is what the business
model in essence is.
Models for organisations have been crafted long
before the introduction of enterprise architecture. For
instance, Nutt (1976) presented six decision-making
models to assists with organisational decision
making, and Beach and Mitchell (1978) modelled a
process how decision makers choose a strategy for the
organisation. The question how to model
organisations goes even further back. For instance,
Brown (1967) introduced various techniques how to
model organisations.
Choosing a strategy to an organisation is
conceptually same than choosing or creating a future
state business architecture. Similarly, executing the
strategy (i.e., change) is conceptually same than the
managed change from the current state to the future
state of the organisation. Therefore, it was a surprise
that there were only five articles related to change. It
was assumed that executing the change would be in
the more important role in MS journals. The low
number of change articles can partly be explained by
the categorisation used in this paper. For instance, if
the article proposed a new way to execute a change,
that is actually a new model of performing your job,
and therefore categorised as a model type of article.
The role of information and communications
technology (ICT) also seems to be an important issue
in MS literature. For instance, Dewett and Jones
(2001) discussed the role of ICT in organizations.
According to their findings, ICT effects enterprise’s
strategic outcomes, efficiency and innovation. This is
hardly a surprise to IS scholars but may indicate the
rising understanding and interest of ICT among MS
scholars.
The literature review, including the articles above,
clearly indicates that although the term enterprise
architecture is not present in MS journals and likely
not known to MS scholars, the constituent
components of enterprise architecture are. The rising
importance of ICT and the need to quickly adapt to
the changing environment calls for more
comprehensive planning, taking into account the
whole organisation and its components. This is where
we believe enterprise architecture could help.
5 DISCUSSION
5.1 Conclusions
In this scoping study, we researched management
science (MS) literature to find out whether the
constituent concepts of enterprise architecture (EA)
are researched by MS scholars. As the results
revealed, these concepts, namely a description and a
managed change of an enterprise, are indeed
researched by MS scholars. When MS scholars are
studying the enterprise’s plans for the future, they do
not call them future state architecture descriptions but
business models and strategies. Nevertheless,
conceptually these are same things, which indicates
that there is a potential terminology issue among IS
and MS scholars. This is problematic as it may widen
the gap between business and ICT.
5.2 Implications
The evidence from the literature review shows that
the concepts of enterprise architecture are researched
also by MS scholars. Authors would like to encourage
EA scholars to expand the scope of EA outside of
traditional ICT and IS thinking. We believe that both
fields would greatly benefit from the future
cooperation.
5.3 Limitations
This study is a scoping study and, as such, is touching
only a limited portion of available MS literature. The
literature review did not cover, for instance, scientific
conferences or books. However, we believe that by
systemically researching the top MS literature gave
us a reasonable view of the current state of enterprise
architecture research in MS field.
5.4 Directions for Future Research
The limitations mentioned above led to the first
suggestion for further research. A more
comprehensive study of MS literature would likely
give a better view of how EA research is currently
evolving in MS field. Also, it would help to confirm
our results.
The second direction for future research would be
to study the terminology used by EA and MS
scholars. It would be interesting to know how
different the used terminology of conceptually same
thing is, and does the differences affect the
cooperation.
REFERENCES
ABS. (2010). Academic Journal Quality Guide. Version 4.
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