  Academics and practitioners have made various claims regarding the benefits
that Enterprise Architecture (EA) delivers for both individual projects and the
organization as a whole. At the same time, there is a lack of explanatory
theory regarding how EA delivers these benefits. Moreover, EA practices and
benefits have not been extensively investigated by empirical research, with
especially quantitative studies on the topic being few and far between. This
paper therefore presents the statistical findings of a theory-building survey
study (n=293). The resulting PLS model is a synthesis of current implicit and
fragmented theory, and shows how EA practices and intermediate benefits jointly
work to help the organization reap benefits for both the organization and its
projects. The model shows that EA and EA practices do not deliver benefits
directly, but operate through intermediate results, most notably compliance
with EA and architectural insight. Furthermore, the research identifies the EA
practices that have a major impact on these results, the most important being
compliance assessments, management propagation of EA, and different types of
knowledge exchange. The results also demonstrate that projects play an
important role in obtaining benefits from EA, but that they generally benefit
less than the organization as a whole.
