Enterprise Architecture: A Maturity Model Based on TOGAF ADM

Abstract

Ensuring the alignment between IT and business can be a difficult challenge. That is the reason why the Enterprise Architecture domain exists, to provide guidance on how to better align Business and IT. There are several methods in existence that guide an organization in developing its Enterprise Architecture. However, putting these methods in practice can become a huge project. The purpose of this paper is to develop a maturity model for Enterprise Architecture in organizations as a governance instrument to analyze and evaluate the current state of affairs, as well as, identify possible areas for improvement. In this way, maturity models facilitate the evolutionary reengineering of all functions related with the lifecycle of an Enterprise Architecture as they allow benchmarking assessment and roadmap planning to be performed. The development of this maturity model is based on design science research grounded in current literature. By collecting the critical success factors of Enterprise Architecture and evaluating the existent maturity models for this domain the conclusion is that there is no maturity model that fully considers all these critical factors. The maturity model proposed in this paper is evaluated through a multi-step perspective that is used to confirm that the maturity model makes a useful and novel contribution to the enterprise architecture domain by taking in consideration the best practice and critical success factors of the domain.