Quantifying the Contribution of Enterprise Architecture to Business Goals

Organizational change can be imposed by a variety of reasons which entail uncertainty for the organization. To realize the change, transformations of the existing enterprise architecture are necessary. Evaluating different alternative solutions in terms of costs, benefits, resources and time to decide which alternative will bring the largest possible benefits to the organization is mandatory. The assessment, though, needs to be based on data and measurements derived from the enterprise architecture which can be analyzed and which can provide more educated and accurate decisions to the organization. A change is motivated through business goals and, hence, the transformations in the architecture should contribute to the satisfaction of the goals. In other words, the expected impact of the transformation, that will take place in the architecture level, should be also visible in the goal level. For supporting the quantitative analysis in the goal domain, the EA-based Goal Quantification method is introduced. The method aims to combine a variety of techniques and analysis models in the goal level and the architecture level and to provide guidelines to the organizations for performing measurements and quantitative assessment based on indicators for identifying the most suitable solution.