Cross-layer Enterprise Architecture Evaluation: An Approach to Improve the Evaluation of TO-BE Enterprise Architecture (Category Architecture)

While studying architecture, I came across article Approaches to assessing the target state of the corporate architecture. The article is quite old, but the key words that interested me were in it. To summarize this article, the authors focus on the evaluation process, but also describe EA processes. (enterprise architecture) In general, and also show how the evaluation process looks in different approaches, and then offer your own:) Everything looks super-bureaucratic and doesn’t apply much, but it can be useful to know about these concepts.

Guys describe the EA process in general 1) Infortmation technology strategic planning In fact, this is a strategic part of creating a vision in terms of IT development to support the mission and strategy of the entire company. 2) Enterprise architecture planning This is part of the corporate architecture planning that consists of building a version of AS-IS, building a target version of TO-BE, and creating a plan to bridge the gap between these states. 3) Enterprise architecture execution This part of the corporate architects is usually no longer interested, as from their side "bullets flew out".

The process of evaluating architecture appears in the second step, and it is important to make sure that the target architecture takes into account all quality attributes. (quality). But everything is complicated by the fact that in corporate architecture guys like layers and offer to think separately about stgrategy, business, information, application, technology. And previous approaches to assessing the target corporate architecture, although they suggested some quality attributes and ways to measure them, did not make this consistent. It's like in Prostokvashino: why Pechkin was angry - he didn't have a bicycle. And there was no consistent approach to evaluation, but the authors of this study suggest their own process.

Criteria should be evaluated through all levels and according to the following methodology. 1) Recognition phase It is assumed that quality attributes are already known in the company, so you just need to choose for them the evaluation criteria, studying the standards, reference model and documentation. It is important to do this at all levels mentioned above. 2) Analysis phase For each of the criteria defined at the previous stage, it is necessary to define the metrics for measurement. 3) Mapping phase - here you need to make mapping artifacts from EA to indicators for measuring quality attributes. If there are no artifacts to evaluate any of the attributes of quality, then it is necessary to start the process of its creation. (it sounds bureaucratic)

These are the benefits the authors highlight in their approach.

• This approach improves the comprehensiveness and integrity of the evaluation by considering the details of all EA layers.
• This approach allows us to examine and determine the maturity level of each layer of the EA. Therefore, the evaluation of EA plans with different scopes is possible by this approach.
• This approach can improve the EA plan by applying all criteria, metrics and corresponding indicators defined in the process of evaluation the EA plan.
• This approach simplifies tracing of EA imperfections.

At the end of the article, the authors give an exemplary example of end-to-end evaluation of quality attributes in the security domain, but it looks like a toy.

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