Using a Mixed-Methods Case Study to Research Enterprise Architecture as Enabler of Organizational Agility

Organizational agility has been pointed out in the literature as one of many benefits to expect when developing and using enterprise architecture but few empirical studies provide an adequate support for that claim. To better understand the linkage between enterprise architecture and organizational agility, a municipality dealing with ever-growing responsibilities and changes in regulations was chosen as a suitable research context. In fact, the public sector, exhibiting high public deficits in several European countries, has been put recently under considerable pressure to become more efficient and agile, something this sector was not used to unlike the private sector. To get a deep and broad understanding of enterprise architecture as enabler of organizational agility, a case study research was carried out in three phases using a mixed-methods approach. In the first phase, an analysis of documentation available on the intranet portals was done to identify the existing enterprise architecture artefacts. In the second phase, a questionnaire with open and closed questions using Likert scales for later quantitative analysis was administered to municipality workers regarding their use of enterprise architecture artefacts. Complementing the data collection with the questionnaire, interviews took place, targeting workers at the managerial level for data triangulation. In the last phase, workers that have already participated in the second phase and have been involved in a specific change situation were interviewed to understand how helpful the enterprise architecture was in providing agility. Direct observations of worker behaviours in using enterprise architecture artefacts took place during the research process. The mixed use of qualitative and quantitative methods for data collection and analysis in a case study of a municipality, allowing for a holistic and deep understanding of the use of enterprise architecture artefacts, provided empirical evidence of the enabling role of enterprise architecture for organizational agility.