Dr Tendai Pfidze

16 August 2026

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) rarely grow in a neat, predictable sequence. A business may have mature customer-facing processes while still relying on informal management structures, spreadsheets, loosely defined roles, and fragmented technology. This creates an interesting question for enterprise architects:

Can enterprise architecture help SMEs manage growth before increasing complexity becomes a constraint?

This is the problem explored by Jacobs, Kotzé, van der Merwe, and Gerber (2011) in Enterprise Architecture for Small and Medium Enterprise Growth. Their proposed Small and Medium Enterprise Architecture for Growth (SMEAG) model attempts to combine traditional SME growth theory with enterprise architecture principles to help small businesses understand where they are, where they want to go, and what needs to change.

The idea remains highly relevant today.

The Problem With Traditional SME Growth Models

Traditional growth-stage models generally describe businesses as progressing through a sequence of developmental stages. As the organisation grows, its management practices, structures, processes, and technology are expected to become progressively more formalised.

Jacobs et al. (2011), however, identify an important weakness in this thinking: different parts of the same organisation may develop at different rates.

An SME could, for example, have:

• sophisticated sales processes,
• relatively immature financial controls,
• highly centralised decision-making,
• fragmented information systems, and
• rapidly growing operational complexity.

Trying to label the entire organisation as being in one particular “growth stage” can therefore hide the differences that actually matter.

More recent research supports the broader idea that SME requirements change throughout organisational development. Quansah et al. (2025), for example, show that the relationship between learning, dynamic capabilities, and performance differs across the firm life cycle. Rungani (2025) similarly argues against one-size-fits-all approaches to SME development.

From Growth Stages to Architecture States

The strongest aspect of SMEAG is its shift away from asking:

“Which growth stage is this organisation in?”

toward asking:

“What is the organisation's current state, what future state does it require, and what must change to get there?”

This is fundamentally an enterprise architecture way of thinking.

Enterprise architecture commonly compares an AS-IS architecture with a desired TO-BE architecture, identifies gaps between the two, and defines the transformation required to reach the target state.

Marimuthu (2021) describes gap analysis as an important bridge between current and future architectures, while more recent business architecture research has similarly applied AS-IS and TO-BE modelling to identify capability, governance, and infrastructure gaps (Fitriani et al., 2025).

For SME growth, this perspective is particularly useful because it allows different organisational areas to mature independently.

Growth no longer needs to mean moving the entire company from “Stage 2” to “Stage 3.” Instead, management can identify specific areas that need to evolve in order to support the organisation's strategic direction.

Making Enterprise Architecture Practical for SMEs

Another strength of SMEAG is its attempt to make enterprise architecture accessible.

The framework introduces three practical artefacts:

This practical orientation matters.

SMEs usually do not have dedicated enterprise architecture teams, large transformation budgets, or extensive architecture repositories. Any architecture approach targeted at SMEs therefore has to be proportionate to their resources.

Champa and Segall (2026) highlight the continuing need for actionable and resource-sensitive guidance for SMEs, while Pingilili et al. (2025) argue that enterprise architecture can support SMEs through better alignment between technology, organisational objectives, resource allocation, and governance.

SMEAG's effort to simplify architecture practice is therefore one of the paper's most valuable contributions.

But SMEAG Does Not Completely Escape Stage Thinking

There is, however, an interesting contradiction within the model.

SMEAG criticises traditional growth-stage frameworks but continues to derive many of its organisational state options from Scott and Bruce's growth-stage model.

In effect, the framework changes the question from:

Which stage is the organisation in?

to:

Which stage-derived characteristics describe each part of the organisation?

That is an improvement because it removes the assumption that every organisational area develops simultaneously. However, it does not establish that the underlying stage categories themselves are universally applicable.

A stronger version of SMEAG could treat lifecycle stages as contextual reference points rather than deterministic classifications.

It could then incorporate factors such as:

• dynamic organisational capabilities,
• learning,
• available resources,
• market conditions,
• technological maturity,
• industry characteristics, and
• external institutional conditions.

This would produce a more flexible architecture model for SME transformation.

The Biggest Weakness: Limited Empirical Validation

The most significant limitation of SMEAG is not conceptual. It is methodological.

The framework was demonstrated using a single consulting SME, with relatively limited detail about case selection, participants, data collection, analytical procedures, or the criteria used to evaluate the framework.

This makes it difficult to determine whether another practitioner applying SMEAG to the same organisation would reach similar conclusions.

The problem becomes clearer when compared with more recent framework-development research.

Fitriani et al. (2025), for example, explicitly use Design Science Research Methodology, including problem identification, objective definition, framework design, demonstration, and evaluation. Their research uses multiple organisational contexts, interviews, document analysis, AS-IS/TO-BE modelling, and structured evaluation criteria.

A similar design-science approach could significantly strengthen SMEAG.

Usability Is Not the Same as Effectiveness

The case study demonstrates that SMEAG can be used to identify organisational concerns and support business planning.

What it does not establish is whether using SMEAG actually leads to better organisational performance.

There is no longitudinal evidence showing improvements in measures such as:

• revenue,
• profitability,
• productivity,
• process performance,
• employment growth,
• organisational efficiency, or
• successful achievement of the intended target state.

This distinction is critical.

A framework that helps managers create a transformation plan is not automatically a framework that improves business performance.

Champa and Segall (2026) raise a similar concern about SME frameworks more broadly, arguing that conceptual models are often developed faster than they are empirically validated.

Future SMEAG research would therefore benefit from following organisations over time and comparing architectural interventions with measurable business outcomes.

Enterprise Architecture Is Only Part of the SME Growth Problem

There is also a danger of treating SME growth primarily as an architecture problem.

Enterprise architecture can help organise capabilities, processes, information, governance, technology, and organisational structures. But businesses do not grow through architecture alone.

Rungani's (2025) research into South African SMMEs highlights factors including financial support, accounting capability, business planning, managerial skills, resources, and knowledge.

Market access, financing, human capital, competition, regulation, and broader economic conditions may all influence whether an SME succeeds.

SMEAG should therefore be understood as an architectural planning mechanism within a wider SME growth system, rather than as a complete explanation of how SMEs grow.

What Enterprise Architects Can Take From SMEAG

Despite its limitations, SMEAG contains an important lesson for enterprise architecture practice.

The most useful insight is not its growth-stage classification.

It is the recognition that organisational transformation should be based on heterogeneous current conditions and deliberate future-state choices.

For an SME, the useful architecture conversation is therefore not:

“What maturity stage are we in?”

It is:

“What capabilities, processes, information, governance, organisation, and technology do we have today; what will the business require tomorrow; and what is the smallest coherent set of changes needed to close that gap?”

That framing turns enterprise architecture from a documentation exercise into a practical transformation discipline.

Final Assessment

Enterprise Architecture for Small and Medium Enterprise Growth makes a valuable contribution by applying enterprise architecture thinking to the problem of increasing organisational complexity during SME growth.

Its strongest contribution is the move from rigid organisational growth stages toward current-state, target-state, and transition thinking. Its practical artefacts also recognise an important reality: architecture approaches designed for SMEs must be simpler and more resource-sensitive than those used in large enterprises.

However, SMEAG remains limited by its dependence on stage-derived categories, a single-case evaluation, limited methodological transparency, and the absence of longitudinal evidence connecting architectural interventions with measurable business outcomes.

The model is therefore best regarded as a promising exploratory framework rather than a validated general model of SME growth.

For enterprise architects working with SMEs, however, the underlying principle is powerful:

References