Improving Agility Through Enterprise Architecture Management: The Mediating Role of Aligning Business and IT

The economic environment of contemporary organizations is becoming increasingly dynamic. Organizational agility fosters sustainable competitive advantage under these turbulent conditions. Prior research demonstrated that strategic IT alignment could enhance organizational agility. Many organizations implemented an enterprise architecture management (EAM) function to achieve benefits such as strategic IT alignment and agility. However, there is little research that explains the pathways between these focal concepts. Hence, we ground our work in the dynamic capabilities view and develop a conceptual model to explain how EAM investments lead to agility mediated by strategic IT alignment. We conducted survey research and collected a sample of 110 respondents. Based on this dataset, we performed a PLS-SEM and cluster analysis to test our model and associated hypotheses. Our results indicate that EAM enhances organizational agility. Strategic IT alignment mediates this effect. Lastly, our results showcase the complementary effect of conducting a PLS-SEM and cluster analysis.