Abstract:
Over the past few decades, the financial industry in South Africa has seen a significant
increase in the adoption of Information Technology (IT). With the increase in the adoption
of the latest trends and technologies, similar to any other industry, organisations have to
deal with the increase in complexity of the management in their technology landscapes.
To address the need to reduce complexity and simplify the technology landscape,
financial services industries are investing in a capability widely recognised as Enterprise
Architecture (EA). Many organisations turn to EA to assist with the alignment of business
and IT as well as to reduce the technical debt that increases as organisations grow. While
some of these organisations succeed in the development and implementation of EA,
many of them fail to manage EA after implementation. The enterprise architecture
management (EAM) field developed because of the specific focus on the management
of EA after the initial implementation. EAM is characterised by many dimensions or
elements, as a result, it becomes a challenge to select the dimensions that should be
managed and that are vital for a successful EAM practice. There is a limited amount of
material guiding which EAM dimensions increase the success of the EAM practice once
implemented. Therefore, this study presents the findings of research conducted to
develop an EAM maturity assessment framework that can be used to measure the
maturity of an organisations EAM practice.
This study used a mixed-method approach which led the data collection process to
include both survey questionnaires and interviews and followed a design science
research methodology. The focus of the research was a selected case study in a financial
services organisation in South Africa and the key findings from the development of the
framework were evaluated against that organisation. The main contribution of this work
is an EAM maturity assessment framework that can be administered in organisations that
want to increase their EAM maturity. Secondary to this, yet seen as vital in the EAM
practice from literature and EAM practitioners is the identification of a list of dimensions
as well as the identification of components and their qualities that are instrumental for
assessing maturity levels.
