Towards the Definition of Enterprise Architecture Debts
This work proposes a new metaphor for enterprise architecture management, which is incremental as it extends the technical debt concept to a broader context.
The paper introduces the concept of Enterprise Architecture Debt (EA Debt) to address the limitations of technical debt by holistically considering both IT and business aspects, linking EA implementation failures to negative impacts on EA quality and business risk.
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.