On enterprise coherence governance with GEA: a 15-year co-evolution of practice and theory

General Enterprise Architecting (GEA) is an enterprise architecture method which has emerged out of a need in practice, and has been developed and matured over the past 15 years. The GEA method differs from other enterprise architecture approaches in that it has a strong focus on enterprise coherence and the explicit governance thereof. This focus followed from the observed need to move beyond the Business-IT alignment and ‘Business-to-IT’ stack thinking that is embodied in most of the existing enterprise architecture approaches. The main objective of this paper is to report, and reflect on, the development of the GEA method (so-far), which involved a co-evolution between theory and practice. In doing so, we also present core elements of (the current version of) GEA, and illustrate these in terms of a real-world (social housing) case. We will, furthermore, also discuss some of the lessons learned in applying GEA across different organizations.