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Measuring the Effect of Enterprise Architecture
posted Nov 28, 2011, 1:25 AM by Alar Raabe

Some things that can be measured for estimating/following the success of enterprise architecture activities:

  • Overall trends in enterprise, for which EA should correspond:
    • Response time trend for business changes – EA has been successful, if the organization has become more agile.
    • Efficiency trend for business operations – EA has been successful, if the organization has become more efficient.
    • Reliability trend of business operations and development – EA has been successful, if the amount of failures (both in operation and development) has been reduced.
  • Special measures for EA value:
    • Maintenance of big-picture and reuse of EA information – the ratio of questions related to strategic decisions that can be answered, based on collected and maintained EA information, to the amount of questions that require a special one-time effort (study or project).
    • Alignment of activities to business goals (the ratio of projects/solutions that are connected to the business goals, to the total number of  projects/solutions).
    • The degree of standardization in business – the ratio of different "ways of working" to the overall number of business functions.
    • The degree of standardization is IT – ratio of different used IT technologies to the overall number of IT systems.
    • The degree of complexity in IT – ratio of supported business functions to the overall number of IT systems.
    • The impression of stakeholders, how good/clear is the target ("TO-BE") picture – rating according to some subjective scale.
    • The impression of stakeholders, how well complexity is handled – rating according to some subjective scale.
  • Measures for strength of EA function:
    • Strength of architecture governance – ratio of projects/solutions evaluated by architecture board, to the total number of  projects/solutions.
    • Conformance to the architectural principles – ratio of projects/solutions following the architectural principles to the total number of projects/solutions.
    • How well the architecture is followed – ratio of architectural exceptions to the projects/solutions evaluated by architecture board.

Copyright ฉ by A.Raabe