Bringing enterprise architecture to the boardroom

Aligning business and Information Technology (IT) has become an important issue for any organization and Enterprise Architecture (EA) is very much related to this purpose. EA describes the overall structure and coherence of an organization. As such, it can provide valuable input for strategic decision making at the executive level. In recent years, EA has become an established discipline both in academia and industry. This research is proposed to take the challenge in presenting EA to the top-level management for a decision making support activity. The research is conducted according to the design science research methodology. A theoretical framework supports the definition of EA, EA stakeholders and their concerns, and the types of EA analysis. Then, the identification of the current decision making process in the domain of EA is explored and then an approach to formalize the decision making activity is proposed. The focus is in the visual representation of the quantitative analysis for the decision making process. The findings of the research is expected to extend the research line in EA domain about the formalization of decision making activity for the top-level management. The first result of this research is a formalized top-down method to support decision making activity that is called EA-based decision making method. Two out of eight steps from the method are explored intensively: defining the metric and preparing the presentation and visualization. This generic method is presented to address all relevant activities to support decision making based on information from EA and prepared in such way for an ease in practical use. The second result is a dashboard concept to facilitate the visualization of this method. The data structure and logic behind the dashboard is presented. To demonstrate the proposed artifacts, the method is applied by means of a case study and then a dashboard concept is implemented in a dashboard prototype. Finally, an evaluation for both artifacts by means of interviews is conducted to know how well they support a solution to the problem. The result provides positive indications.