Communication as a critical success factor to enterprise architecture implementation / Muhammad Syazani Rosian

Communication is the act of exchanging ideas and understanding and the goal of communication is to have same level of understanding between the sender and receiver. Communication is an element that has an impact towards the success of a project in an organization. With the rapid growth of technology, organization undertake the effort to implement Enterprise Architecture (EA). EA aligns the Information Technology (IT) and business strategy to overcome complexity in an organization. Regardless of how EA is being used, implementing EA itself is challenging. Previous studies perceived communication as one of the factors that determine the success of an EA implementation. The aim of this study is to construct a communication model which will act as a communication tool among stakeholder to assist the implementation of EA. Enterprise architect and top management are two different stakeholders that have different view and understanding towards EA. Both stakeholders were selected to be analyzed in this research as the enterprise architect is the one who provide the input and the top management is the one who make decision from the input provided. Therefore, the communication between them is very crucial as it could determine the success of an EA implementation. Good communication between both stakeholders could improve the process of decision making from initiation to the implementation. The communication challenges in EA implementation revealed the issue on the common understanding of EA and knowledge of stakeholder towards realizing EA. The study on communication challenges lead to a construction of communication model based on the issues identified from the analyzed data of this research. The important elements that are part of the communication model for success of EA implementation are on the common understanding, knowledge and awareness towards EA, continuous communication and the communication plan. The communication model is aimed to assist the communication between the enterprise architect and top management towards having a success EA implementation.