Enterprise architecture is a description of an enterprise from an integrated business and IT perspective intended to bridge the communication gap between business and IT stakeholders and improve business and IT alignment. Enterprise architecture consists of multiple different artifacts providing certain views of an organization and the available enterprise architecture literature offers a number of comprehensive lists of artifacts that can be used as part of an enterprise architecture practice. However, these lists of enterprise architecture artifacts were never validated empirically and the practical usage of different artifacts still remains largely unexplored. Based on a comprehensive empirical analysis of enterprise architecture artifacts used in 27 diverse organizations, this study identifies the list of 24 common artifacts that proved useful in practice and describes in detail their usage and purpose. Although this study does not attempt to theorize on the findings, it makes a significant empirical contribution to the enterprise architecture discipline. In particular, this study (1) provides the first consistent list of enterprise architecture artifacts that actually proved useful in organizations, (2) offers the first available systematic description of their usage, (3) questions the common view of enterprise architecture as a set of business, information, applications and technology architectures and (4) questions the widely accepted conceptualization of enterprise architecture as a set of the current state, future state and transition roadmap. This study provides compelling empirical evidence in favor of reconceptualizing enterprise architecture and calls for further research in this direction.

中文翻译：

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企业架构和企业架构工件：根据新发现质疑旧概念

企业架构是从集成的业务和 IT 角度对企业的描述，旨在弥合业务和 IT 利益相关者之间的沟通差距，并改善业务和 IT 的一致性。企业架构由多个不同的工件组成，提供组织的某些视图，可用的企业架构文献提供了许多可用作企业架构实践的一部分的工件的综合列表。然而，这些企业架构工件列表从未经过经验验证，不同工件的实际使用在很大程度上仍未得到探索。基于对 27 个不同组织中使用的企业架构工件的综合实证分析，这项研究确定了 24 个在实践中证明有用的常见工件的列表，并详细描述了它们的用途和目的。尽管本研究并未尝试对发现进行理论化，但它对企业架构学科做出了重大的实证贡献。特别是，这项研究 (1) 提供了第一个一致的企业架构工件列表，这些工件实际上被证明在组织中有用，(2) 提供了第一个可用的对其使用的系统描述，(3) 质疑企业架构作为一个集合的共同观点业务、信息、应用程序和技术架构，以及 (4) 质疑广泛接受的企业架构概念化，即一组当前状态、未来状态和转换路线图。