Abstract
Abstract—Organisations rely on information and communication technologies (ICT) as an essential part of their operations, as well as providing strategic advantage. Enterprise architecture (EA) is a function within an organisation to maximise return on investment of ICTs, and to ensure that the Information Systems (IS) function in the organisation is not a bottleneck for organisational growth and agility. This study surveyed small and large organisations in South Africa, to determine what the impact (and value) of the IS architecture and maturity of the IS function is on the business processes and the organisation as a whole. We also compared larger versus smaller organisations as well as informative-intensive versus non information-intensive organisations. The key findings were that there is a strong empirical basis for many of the claimed benefits of EA. In particular, EA seems to facilitate business process automation, more so (in our sample) than business agilty. However, EA has real organisational impacts, enabling especially long term cost reduction and enterprise agility. Also, although the higher importance and impact of EA and ICTs in information-intensive organisations was confirmed, surprisingly few significant differences were found between large and small organisations.
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