Investigating the Role of Enterprise Architects in Supporting Large-Scale Agile Transformations: A Multiple-Case Study

In today's competitive environments, companies must cope with changing customer demands, regulatory uncertainties, and new technological advances. To this end, companies increasingly undergo large-scale agile transformations to meet these requirements. In recent years, enterprise architecture management has established itself as a valuable governance mechanism for coordinating large-scale agile transformations by connecting strategic considerations to the execution of transformation projects. Empirical studies investigating the role of enterprise architects (EAs) in this context are still scarce. We present a multiple-case study of five major German companies that aims to shed light on the role of EAs in supporting large-scale agile transformations. Based on our results from eighteen interviews, we present a set of typical responsibilities of EAs. We also describe the expectations of various stakeholders towards EAs and the challenges they face.