Measuring Enterprise Architecture Effectiveness: A Focus on Key Performance Indicators

Any organizational practice should be able to show its “value”, including enterprise architecture (EA). Measuring the extent to which EA leads to certain desired results is essential when determining its value for an organization. However, measuring this EA e↵ectiveness is often deemed di cult by both practitioners and researchers. Reasons for this are, for example, causality issues, a longer-term focus, and the di culty of selecting performance indicators. As one should be aware of what to focus on when measuring EA e↵ectiveness, a specified set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is needed. Therefore, the aim of this research is to arrive at a clear overview of KPIs that can be used to measure EA e↵ectiveness. To arrive at a clear overview of KPIs for EA e↵ectiveness, a design science research approach was adopted. For data collection prior to the design, qualitative methods were adopted; a semi-structured literature review was done and interviews were held with 18 experts in the field of EA. Prior to each interview, experts were asked to fill out an input survey. The outputs of these methods formed the input for the design phase. Initial versions of the proposed solution have been evaluated through intermediate assessments, an interactive evaluation session and an evaluation survey, and have been modified accordingly. In this document, the resulting Focus Framework for Enterprise Architecture Measurements (FFEAM) is presented, which can be used to measure EA e↵ectiveness by focusing on four areas: the decisionmaking process, the decision-making results, program implementation, and the actual program results. This framework can be implemented through a set of 22 KPIs for EA e↵ectiveness. It is believed that this framework will help organizations measure the e↵ectiveness of their EA by shifting the focus of EA measurements to the actual desired results. Measuring EA e↵ectiveness