Lost in decentralization? Governing emerging technologies within enterprise architecture

Abstract

Enterprise systems governance is undergoing a shift toward decentralization and federation, as platforms and tools increasingly empower business users to create and deploy applications outside professional IT. Low-Code Development Platforms (LCDPs) represent a prominent instance of this trend, enabling rapid application development while simultaneously introducing challenges for Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM). Through a multiple-case analysis of organizations from financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing, we identify three governance challenges organized around what is governed (architectural drift), who is governed (role ambiguity and shifting accountability), and how governance is enacted (tension between formal and informal control), and show that that organizations address these challenges through deliberately composed governance portfolios pairing formal instruments with informal enabling practices. Reasoning abductively across cases, we identify five mechanisms through which these portfolios produce durable EA outcomes: information symmetry, perceived legitimacy, developer capability, enacted decision-right alignment, and secure-by default conditions. Theoretically, we contribute by distinguishing the locus of control (centralized vs decentralized) from the mode of control (formal vs informal), and by offering a mechanism-based explanation of how governance portfolios produce EA outcomes under decentralized development conditions, moving beyond generic prescriptions for “balance” toward a concrete account of why specific governance compositions work. Practically, our analysis underscores the need to continuously recalibrate governance as decentralized technologies proliferate, requiring increasingly adaptive EAM strategies to balance innovation, flexibility, and architectural coherence.