The Impact of Enterprise Architecture on Business Performance

"The industrial age is now and forever over and the game has forever changed!" This as the reaction of John Zachman to people who asked him how to cost-justify Enterprise Architecture (EA). His frustration towards this essential question illustrates an ever present issue of the field of EA: an understanding of how EA improves business performance remains elusive. The vast amount of qualitative claims about alleged benefits from practitioners and researchers alike does not help to provide clarity in this ambiguous field. One thing has become clear though: EA certainly has benefits, yet they do not impact business performance directly. Hence the difficulty in establishing how business performance is impacted by EA. This research therefore aims to provide insight to way EA yields benefits for business performance. This is accomplished by clarifying which benefits EA can yield, which activities of EA are responsible for these beneftis and how the benefits impact business performance.