Analysis of the current State of Enterprise Architecture Evaluation Methods and Practices

First published in the Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Management and Evaluation (ECIME 2007), September 20-21, 2007, Montpellier, FranceToday, more and more organizations adopt enterprise architecture (EA) processes to cope with the changing environment and to improve their performance and competitiveness. However, the evaluation of EA regarding its quality and benefits is rather difficult. The studies of previous research resulted in the recognition that there is no methodology for enabling the EA evaluation by considering the whole EA. Therefore, this paper presents and analyses the current state of methods and practices to evaluate EA from different viewpoints. The introduced approaches focus especially on performing an assessment mainly based on architectural descriptions. All methods, standards, and measures address EA related concerns and evaluation needs regarding business, information, systems, and technology. All of the presented techniques have been developed or tested and validated in a practical environment