Establishing Enterprise Architecture Metrics: Seven Essential Steps

One of the primary reasons that enterprise architecture (EA) has soared in popularity in recent years is because of the realization that it is a business affair, as much as it is a technical concept. EA offers a blueprint for corporate IT strategies and can help align enterprise-wide IT initiatives with the business.
 

AN OVERVIEW
Not surprisingly, many visionary leaders in the IT community actively promote the practicalities of “transformation,” “innovation,” “collaboration,” and “execution” for business-solution delivery. Indeed, transformation, innovation, and collaboration are the three primary cornerstones of success in any enterprise-level integration initiative. Each of these areas together delivers succinct and quantifiable business value. However, the fabric that provides the people, process, and technology perspectives for the above-mentioned areas to optimize business-value delivery is extremely important. This fabric, EA, usually extends its span from the business models to the integrated solutions deployed over an incremental and iterative integration life cycle.

Today, the value of EA has become preeminent for most companies integrating their enterprisewide business applications. Many practitioners realize that in a rapidly changing and evolving business environment, an enterprise must measure, manage, and improve its flexibility in successfully deploying integration initiatives. EA can engage both the business and IT teams from the beginning, and EA metrics can present a consistent vehicle to measure most of the critical elements of business value. It is essential for practitioners to explore how to establish EA metrics.

Practitioners must measure, manage, and improve the flexibility of their enterprise using EA metrics when deploying integration initiatives. Practitioners in an enterprise establish EA metrics to share experiences and lessons learned from the trenches. In this effort, a special attention is usually directed to the following aspects:
 

• Review key benefits and limitations of EA metrics while exploring what EA metrics may really mean for other practitioners from transformation, innovation, collaboration, and execution perspectives.
• Create a road map that can be used to establish the EA metrics in all small, medium, and large-scale enterprise-level integration of business solutions.
• Explain the practical concepts of the road map (with seven essential steps presented in this article) that practitioners can utilize in their enterprise-level integration initiatives.
• The primary objective of this article is to present a pragmatic road map for EA practitioners to establish the right parameters when establishing EA metrics. The road map expounds on how to govern and manage EA metrics using a seven-step approach. These steps help the enterprise teams in delivering transformational and innovative business solutions or services, while understanding the significance of the metrics about EA-related activities.

A ROADMAP
For large and medium-sized companies, it is often difficult to depict the overall representation of enterprise-level initiatives. It is simply too complex. In general, the activities involved in big picture enterprise-level architectural initiatives can be categorized into three groups:

• Business and IT collaborative tasks: a set of activities that involves supporting business and IT strategic alliance; evaluation, assessment, and selection of technology, tools, and techniques; alignment of existing and new business processes with the IT capabilities; management of change and process improvement; as well as management of performance and solution delivery.
• Enterprise architecture-related activities: this set of activities presents a life-cycle approach elaborating on various steps to transition and transform the “asis” EA to its “to-be” form for a company.
• Enterprise IT common tasks: these tasks are representative of a multitude of activities that are primarily directed toward managing the enterprise-level initiative objectives and goals. These activities include portfolio management, quality assurance, productivity improvement, and compliance with regulatory mandates, policies, and procedures.

All the activities in the above-mentioned categories present a “big picture” account of discrete and distinct parameters essential for establishing EA metrics. An important aspect of this road map is that it can allow tracking the metrics from the point of capturing business requirements to delivering integrated enterprise application solutions. However, it is essential for practitioners to encompass all the people, process, and technology elements of the enterprise associated with the road map.

Once the big picture for the enterprise-level architectural initiatives is visualized, practitioners must concentrate on five focus areas to identify the right parameters for establishing EA metrics:

• Infrastructure support: defines the fundamental elements of EA metrics from the infrastructure support perspective. Infrastructure support lays out the foundation for supporting network, security, and architectural features such as flexibility, scalability, and performance.
• Operations support: facilitates the procedure for capturing metrics data. This support function ensures architectural support and oversight accountabilities for service or solution delivery, disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC), and lessons learned from application life-cycle management (ALM) efforts.
• EA governance: monitors the adherence of metrics by individual projects across the enterprise. It defines policies, procedures, and guidelines to be employed by project teams. SOA governance can be an extrapolation of this function.
• EA management: manages the metrics captured for individual application development or integration projects and recommendations for strategic technical directions. For some companies, this function extends to managing SOA initiatives.
• EA maturity program: for most companies, the EA maturity programs are linked with process improvement initiatives such as CMMI projects, and metrics are shared across the maturity and capability evaluations.

These five focus areas jointly leverage each other to transform, innovate, collaborate, and execute business and IT alignment–and subsequently deliver optimized business value. However, I have learned from the trenches that each of these functions may not contribute equally to establishing EA metrics.

SEVEN ESSENTIAL STEPS
Experience tells us that EA metrics can be established using seven essential steps. While I have cultivated these steps from the trenches, I believe they can be modified, refined, and customized to reflect specific situations encountered by practitioners in the field. These metrics can be measured and monitored using distinctively different reports, scorecards, and dashboards.

1. Define a business case for EA practice with a special focus on target “to-be” EA. This is usually the most critical step to identify risks, issues, and concerns, and explore critical success factors early. This is also the step where practitioners must weigh in the cost benefits as well as performance enhancements expected from the enterprise-level transformation to future-state EA. Practitioners should make a business case during this step by addressing questions such as:
   • What are the key elements of current enterprise technology blueprints?
     • Is an inventory of IT assets available?
     • Do these current assets have any associated projects?
   • What recommendations for capital investments toward IT can be made to the senior leadership of the company?
2. Establish a strategy for implementing and deploying target EA. This step involves conducting a number of strategic focus group sessions and discussions to determine the potential approach that can be used during enterprise-wide integration initiatives. This step also helps practitioners formalize a set of architectural principles that can support the business objectives. Practitioners usually delve into issues and challenges related to the core IT strategy, technical direction, and overall corporate IT guidance including:
   • What are the principal IT strategy elements? How well do they match up with the corporate business goals and objectives?
   • What are the lessons learned from implementing previous IT strategies?
3. Enforce best practices, standards, policies, and EA guiding principles. This step formalizes a governance mechanism and structure for the enterprise to influence various application development, integration, and management teams. To identify the right set of EA metrics parameters, practitioners focus on:
   • New or future technology blueprints and enterprise-wide reusable standards, and address EA compliance policies and procedures.
   • Plans for compliance enforcement–waivers, corrective measures, and extensions– (and the processes to review each cases for individual projects/applications).
4. Define a road map with blueprints, milestones, and deliverables to follow the formalized EA principles. This is the step where rubber meets the road for all practitioners involved in enterprise-level initiatives. Business and IT, architects and developers, managers and subject matter experts actively participate in identifying how all the organizations can employ EA practice in a timely manner. This means not just identifying the right set of metrics but also refining them as appropriate throughout the system or service integration life cycle. Common questions that arise during this step are:
   • Did the IT organizations involved in EA initiatives use a road map before, which employs similar best practices and blueprints defined by the EA practice?
   • What kind of help and resources are needed to build a road map, and does the organization have previous experience in or capability of delivering measurable EA solutions?
   • Can the organization interact with its business customers and the EA team to define measurable benefits of the EA, plan to transition the current architecture to target architecture, and define risks of employing new technologies, tools, and techniques?
5. Plan a set of EA processes to implement the road map to put the EA metrics to work. This step helps various IT organizations plan to allocate the right resources, technology, and techniques in implementing appropriate architectural frameworks, reference models, standards, tools, and processes. Major questions in this step include:
   • Do the IT organizations have a process in place or have previous experience with a process to support the proposed EA activities?
   • Can the defined process help achieve the desired EA features and qualities?
   • Can the process support the IT organization in adopting the prescribed architectural frameworks?
   • Can the process empower business teams to get actively involved?
6. Measure, monitor, and control the EA integration initiatives with EA metrics. This step helps EA governance review various activities in enterprise-integration initiatives and assess compliance to EA policies. Practitioners usually encounter questions like:
   • How does the EA practice conduct a review, inspection, or walkthrough of the EA activities? What are the periodic intervals between such activities?
   • What are the primary architectural qualities and features that impact the identified business goals?
   • How do the IT organizations provide information that can be reported to the governance board? What are the steps in place for the approval process for the ongoing or future EA activities?
7. Align EA activities with delivering the business objectives at all times. This step facilitates maintaining the EA activities in such a way that they are in line with the defined business objectives and goals for the enterprise. The step really spans across the entire life cycle of the enterprise initiatives. Practitioners define and refine many EA metrics–and if necessary, make changes to the associated EA activities. During this step, they pose the following questions for the initiatives:
   • Do the IT and business organizations have available competencies, technologies, and resources to collaborate?
   • Which essential business and IT collaboration elements exist for strategic and project-level alignments?

CONCLUSION
While these steps are applicable to large and mid-size companies invariably, it is important to note that establishing EA metrics requires active involvement and participation of both business and IT organizations. EA metrics are not just for the architects–each and every organization and its team members can benefit from using EA metrics in its decision-making process. For most companies, establishing EA metrics using the seven steps mentioned above is a large undertaking. It requires a significant investment of time, energy, and resources, and it is essential to prepare a business first and then deliver the metrics incrementally and iteratively over a period of time. It is vital that practitioners ready their organizations to let everyone involved visualize the EA “big picture” and how various business applications interact with each other. The true value of EA metrics can then be achieved over a period of business transformation, innovation, collaboration, and execution of solution delivery.

References

1.  Hazra, Tushar K., “Getting Your EA Metrics Right,” Executive Report, Cutter Consortium Enterprise Architecture Advisory Services, Vol. 9, No. 9, September 2006.
2. Hazra, Tushar K., “Trends in Enterprise Architecture Metrics: Year 2007 and Beyond,” Executive Report, Cutter Consortium Enterprise Architecture Advisory Services, Vol. 10, No. 1, January 2007.
3. Hazra, Tushar K., “Getting Your EA Metrics Right,” Shared Insights Enterprise Architectures Conference, New Orleans, LA, March 27–29, 2007.

Tushar K Hazra, PhD, is the president, founder, and chief technology officer of EpitomiOne, a strategic consulting company specializing in enterprise architecture (EA), service-oriented architecture (SOA ) deployment, portals, Web services development, model-driven solution delivery, IT governance and service-delivery management, and global sourcing strategy facilitation. He can be reached at tkhazra@sbcglobal.net.