In the software development industry, technical debt is regarded as a critical issue in term of the negative consequences such as increased software development cost, low product quality, decreased maintainability, and slowed progress to the long-term success of developing software. However, despite the vast research contributions in technical debt management for software engineering, the idea of technical debt fails to provide a holistic consideration to include both IT and business aspects. Further, implementing an enterprise architecture (EA) project might not always be a success due to uncertainty and unavailability of resources. Therefore, we relate the consequences of EA implementation failure with a new metaphor --Enterprise Architecture Debt (EA Debt). We anticipate that the accumulation of EA Debt will negatively influence EA quality, also expose the business into risk.
Since many aspects influence the system's properties a unified meta model is difficult to create. However, @cite_15 show that even different enterprise orientations with divergent focuses prefer certain qualities over others. In general, they show that the striven qualities differ across enterprises, nevertheless, there are some general qualities that are desired in most situations. Thus, a specialized prioritization and adaptation is needed for the EA and its IT business alignment.
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Enterprise Architecture models can be used to support IT business alignment. However, existing approaches do not distinguish between different IT business alignment situations. Since companies face diverse challenges in achieving a high degree of IT business alignment, a universal ‘one size fits all’ approach does not seem appropriate. This paper proposes to decompose the IT business alignment problem into tangible qualities for business, IT systems, and IT governance. An explorative study among 162 professionals is used to distinguish four IT business alignment situations, i.e. four clusters of IT business alignment problems. These situations each represent the current state according to certain qualities and also the priorities for future development. In order to increase IT business alignment, enterprise architecture meta models are proposed for each identified situation. One core meta model (to reflect common priorities) as well as situation specific extensions are presented.