Past, current and future trends in enterprise architecture-A view beyond the horizon

Since its introduction in the late nineteen eighties, the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA) has evolved into a well-known practice of managing information systems in alignment with business interests. The evolution of the discipline is reflected in the many available scientific publications. Within a timeframe of three decades, we identify approximately 4000 journal articles and conference papers of which enterprise architecture is a major topic. We conduct a holistic, systematic literature review using artificial intelligence technologies such as information retrieval, text mining and supervised learning, side-by-side with manually reading of many relevant articles. For the first time, we present a holistic historical overview of the scientific development of the discipline. We describe the current focus of enterprise architecture and make suggestions for future publications and conferences using predictive analytics. As a major result of our analysis, we find that the focus of EA research has shifted from understanding EA in the early years to managing EA today. Furthermore, we identify and investigate several current EA trend topics: We find Cloud Computing to be the trend with the strongest impact on EA and predict that this will be the case until 2020. According to our forecast, the Internet of Things will be the trend with the strongest growth in its impact on EA. Moreover, based on a comparison with the Gartner Hype Cycle, we observe a discrepancy between EA trends in academic work versus practical experiences, which presents a starting point for future research. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.