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Top1. Introduction
The increasing complexity of business processes and services caused challenges for the organizations to see the holistic view of their business (Al-Kharusi, Miskon & Mahadi, 2017a). Moreover, the high turnover of IT solutions and the increased reliance of business on IT created a challenge to align business strategy with IT investment (Al-Kharusi, Miskon & Mahadi, 2017b; Birkmeier, Gehlert, Overhage, & Schlauderer, 2013). Hence, Enterprise Architecture (EA) was suggested as an approach to improve business IT alignment, manage organizational complexity, and support organization transformation (Al-Kharusi, Miskon & Mahadi, 2017b). Lankhorst defined EA, as “…a coherent whole of principles, methods and models that are used in the design and realization of an enterprise’s organizational structure, business processes, information systems, and infrastructure…” (Penttinen & Isomäki, 2010, p. 1).
The enterprise architects and the stakeholders are the main actors in the development of EA (Al-Kharusi, Miskon & Mahadi, 2017b). The enterprise architects are responsible of collecting information about EA (Al-Kharusi, Miskon & Mahadi, 2017b; Buckl, Matthes, & Schweda, 2010b). They evolve the EA through a set of models and play the role of managing, communicating, leading and modeling (Clark et al., 2014; Gotze, 2013). Although enterprise architects are part of EA stakeholders but distinguished as enterprise architects to differentiate their role of leading and managing the development process of EA (Al-Kharusi, Miskon & Mahadi, 2017b). The enterprise architects use the EA’s framework to guide the development and implementation of EA in the organization. EA framework is a set of guidelines, models and artifacts descriptions that are used by the architects (Alaeddini & Salekfard, 2013). It provides a structure and organizing logic for the organization-captured information (Berrada & Bounabat, 2013). Bourey and Medini (2012) explained that EA frameworks provide steps on how to analyze and build the as-is architecture and actions required to reach the to-be architecture. The description of the framework in EA development differs based on the type of the used framework. The first published framework was Zachman framework and later several frameworks proposed, such as The Open Group Framework (TOGAF) (Kloeckner & Birkmeier, 2010).