Adaptive Enterprise Architecture: Initiatives and Criteria

Due mainly to digital transformation, enterprises are immersed in dynamic environments. They are dealing with internal and external changes (gradual or abrupt, frequent or occasional, in the short or long term) that impact various parts of their Enterprise Architecture. To cope with the requirements of this new digital era, agility and adaptation are compulsory. Though Enterprise Architecture (EA) was designed as a catalyst for change management, traditional Enterprise Architecture approaches do not rely on well-defined concepts, lack agility and are constrained by layered architecture (business layer, functional layer, deployment layer, etc.). Thus, a new generation of EA, allowing continuous self-improvement and proactive adaptation to better match the new conditions, is required. In this paper, we explore and investigate some approaches of EA that deal with change management. Then, we, particularly, note the various definitions of the notion of adaptive EA, according to literature. Finally, we suggest some criteria, regarding the adaptation of EA, to highlight the limitations of the approaches analyzed. © 2020 IEEE.