Past, current and future trends in enterprise architecture-A view beyond the horizon

As a major result of our analysis, we find that the focus of EA research has shifted from understanding EA in the early years to managing EA today. Furthermore, we identify and investigate several current EA trend topics: We find Cloud Computing to be the trend with the strongest impact on EA and predict that this will be the case until 2020. According to our forecast, the Internet of Things will be the trend with the strongest growth in its impact on EA. Moreover, based on a comparison with the Gartner Hype Cycle, we observe a discrepancy between EA trends in academic work versus practical experiences, which presents a starting point for future research.