Method and Practical Guidelines for Overcoming Enterprise Architecture Adoption Challenges

During the last few years, interest towards Enterprise Architecture (EA) has increased, not least due to anticipated benefits resulting from adopting it. For instance, EA has been argued to provide cost reduction, technology standardisation, process improvement, and strategic differentiation. Despite these benefits, the EA adoption rate and maturity are still low. Consequently, EA benefits are not realised. A major reason hindering the adoption is that EA is not understood correctly. This paper aims for minimising the effect of the lack of understanding EA to adopting EA. Based on the research conducted in Finnish public sector, we propose an improved Enterprise Architecture Adoption Method (EAAM) to overcome the EA adoption challenges. EAAM is built using Design Science approach and evaluated using Delphi method. Some practical guidelines for applying EAAM are also provided to help organisations to overcome EA adoption challenges.peerReviewe

Employee engagement and internal branding:two sides of the same coin?

Abstract This study examines the link between employee engagement and internal branding. It seeks to understand which antecedent factors healthcare professionals consider important for employee engagement and what kinds of implications this engagement-related information may have for internal branding. The study reviews the literature on employee engagement and internal branding and presents a conceptualisation of the linkage between the two concepts. The empirical portion content analyses more than 1200 answers to open questions to examine employee engagement in the case organisation, a large private healthcare organisation in Finland. The findings suggest the following eight antecedent factors to be particularly important for healthcare professionals’ employee engagement: organisational culture, reward, working environment, training, HR practices, reputation and values, communication, and physical environment. Based on the empirical and theoretical analyses, it can be said that the antecedent factors of employee engagement and elements of internal branding can be considered two sides of the same coin