The categories ‘‘Interaction among architects’’ and ‘‘Interactions
with other stakeholders’’ were compared and related with the categories
of each architect role and the ‘‘Collaboration’’ category during
axial coding. During selective code, they were linked to the
main category (‘‘Transformation’’) as a way to describe the theory
we were developing. Based on that, we observed that IT architects
interact among themselves in addition to interacting with very
specific sets of stakeholders. Their activities are interconnected;
they depend on each other’s work in different ways. In summary,
they receive information from different groups of stakeholders,
perform their own work using this, and additional information
they seek, and then pass a different type of information along to
the next architect. The following quote from Company A illustrates
this aspect.