Awaiting Explanation in the Field of Enterprise Architecture Management

Over the past few years, enterprise architecture management (EAM) has become increasingly popular in academia and in practice. One reason for this is that organizations seek to make use of various benefits that have been associated with EAM. However, researchers have stressed that EAM research has mainly focused on prescriptive frameworks and methodologies, whereas these concepts and associated impacts and outcomes have seen little generalization and verification to date. In this paper we explore this claim. Based on a comprehensive literature analysis, we found that prescriptive research does indeed dominate the field. However, we also found that few researchers have analyzed and generalized EAM phenomena, whereas the share of contributions to explanation and prediction is negligibly small. We summarize common EAM processes as well as impact and outcome factors that have emerged from this research and show to what extent the relationship between these components has thus far been explained.