Conclusion and result

The intention of this study is to enriching the field of Enterprise Architecture in depicting the human activities portrayed in the role of the Enterprise Architect as a profession. The aim of this study is to provide an extensive picture of the Enterprise Architect, comparing the literature with the empirical data collected, where the analytical lens will cover the architects’ role, competence, power, style of acting and main focus. This study has primarily focused the current state for the respondents interviewed as empirical evidence regarding what an Enterprise Architect is dealing with in their everyday work life. The research questions reads: “What characterizes an Enterprise Architect’s profession, and what is the profession’s main ambition? and “How does academic research differ from an empirical based view with respect to the topics; role, competence, power, style of acting and main focus?”. As an answer to this Kappa’s research questions, the summary of the result in comparing and contrasting the literature study with the empirical study is illustrated in table 12 below: Table 1. The overall and summary of the comparison of the literature and empirical study. In several aspects, there are consistency between how the literature depicts the Enterprise Architect and the respondents’ view of their work field, revealed from the empirical study in this thesis. Most prominent are the skills, described as the Enterprise Architect’s “Competence” topic in this study. However, the significant differences are found in the research topics “Style of Acting” and “Main Focus” where the contrasting findings are the literature’s research in directing a scientific path while the empirical study reveals another path where other aspects than the EA associated are to be considered. The “Power” topic is widely distributed in the literature while limited to the architectural aspects only, in reality. The research topic “Role” of the Enterprise Architect differs from business to business and its operational orientation, which is evident in the empirical study while vaguely, depicted in the literature. The role of the Enterprise Architect profession could still be found in its infancy while this study’s research gap shed light of the limited empirical data that portrays this profession. There is a necessity to reframing the future research to comprise not the possible aspect of this profession only, but in addition to perform further studies to analyze the reality of this profession. Moreover, the EA literature affects the description of the Enterprise Architecture in general but neglects the performers as humans, which further address a need to reframing the EA research. In conclusion, the architect's characteristics can be described in terms of being a proud individualist with an entrepreneurial vein who endeavor consideration, reflection and the guidance capability. The architect’s main ambition is to promote the EA where the architects uphold the communication skills as the key to success in their missionary work to convince their organizations about the EA’s strategic capability. This study shows that this profession is under continuous change and development. Though, the architects aim to work within a proactive style of acting, their work is in reality mainly influenced by a reactive approach and the most important competence within their profession is to understand the business. Further, this study shows that the role includes comprehensive power to influence the organizational architecture, but lack the power to influence the organizational operations through the decisions that the architecture involves.