Enterprise architecture measures of effectiveness

Today, many organisations are concerned with how to successfully transition to organisations utilising information technology to its fullest strategic extent. It has become widely recognised that an organisation's enterprise architecture plays a key role in the transition and many organisations are now investing significant amounts of resources into developing or improving their enterprise architecture. From a functional perspective, an enterprise architecture explains how all the information technology elements in an organisation – systems, processes, organisations, and people – work together as a whole. For an organisation to continue to justify expending resources on enterprise architecture, it must be able to show positive effects of enterprise architecture efforts. However, demonstrating the positive effects of enterprise architecture is difficult because it is always changing and its effects cannot be directly or easily measured. There are a number of methods for demonstrating effectiveness of enterprise architecture. These include developing measures of effectiveness for the enterprise architecture based on critical operational issues or objectives of the enterprise architecture. This paper discusses these methods and suggests strategies for measuring the effectiveness of enterprise architectures.