Towards a Unified and Configurable Structure for EA Management KPIs

Abstract

The discipline Enterprise Architecture (EA) management aims to align business and IT, foster communication, and support the everlasting transformation of the organization. Thereby, EA management initiatives are driven by respective EA management goals, whose degree of achievement must be measurable. This calls for the definition of corresponding Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) enabling enterprise architects to plan, forecast, benchmark, and assess the goal fulfillment. As recent literature in the field shows, there are only few KPIs dedicated to validate EA management goal achievement. Moreover, existing indicators are differently structured, selective regarding the specific EA management goals, too general and vague with respect to the required data, and do not provide any adoption techniques for the enterprise context. In this paper we present a structure enabling the unified and configurable description of EA management KPIs. While the artifact ensures consistency among documented KPIs, it further provides guidance during their introduction and organization-specific adaptation. As first evaluation results prove, EA management domain experts consider the artifact on the whole as being helpful and applicable while simultaneously confirming the relevance of its constituents.