Market-Driven Enterprise Architecture

Throughout the last decade, business leaders have consistently reported their top two challenges as managing change and complexity. Market-orientation and enterprise architecture are two disciplines that lend themselves to helping leaders meet such challenges. Yet, while they have gained separate momentum in academia and practice, they remain poorly integrated and suffer from resulting individual deficits. This article summarizes the findings from an exploratory study (Højsgaard 2010) of what has been entitled Market-Driven Enterprise Architecture (MDEA). Under the premise that organizations can benefit from both areas, and that they hold joint potential in maximizing business success, the MDEA is developed as a conceptual and practical integration of market-orientation and enterprise architecture. By developing the model into a measurement scale and applying it to a sample of the enterprise architecture community, empirical evidence is found for the presence of MDEA in practice, support of reliability and validity of the MDEA measurement scale, as well as positive and statistically significant relationships to business performance.