Leveraging Metrics for Enterprise Architecture Governance

Enterprise architecture governance is a consensus-driven framework. Business and IT professionals use it to guide significant architecture decisions. The framework helps professionals oversee the delivery of business value from major enterprise-level architecture activities. To maximize the effectiveness of the governance process, a consistent measurement program with a set of easy-to-use metrics is recommended. EA metrics can simplify and validate architecture decisions and in doing so assist the organization in delivering the targeted business value. This article explains how to derive and implement metrics across an enterprise to achieve EA governance objectives.

Establishing EA Governance

The influence of EA governance spans across the technology and business domains in any organization at both strategic and tactical levels. EA governance, as a subset of IT governance, begins in the realm of enterprise business planning at the strategic level. The value creation for an enterprise starts with the development of a business strategy based on the organization’s key business drivers. The resulting approach then guides the inception of IT strategy. Subsequently, IT strategy influences enterprise business strategy over a period of time. Together, these two strategies drive the formation of modern EA—a combination of business and IT architectures existing symbiotically. Once established, EA governance supports the decision makers in the underlying architecture domains at a tactical level—in the operations as well as the execution of release management (see figure 1).

EA Governance Objectives

EA governance enables practitioners to focus on achieving desirable levels of IT quality and performance, while making sure that appropriate infrastructure support is in place to deliver the right business solutions. For most large commercial companies or government agencies, primary objectives of EA governance include the following:

• Effective Value Creation and Delivery: Managing, controlling, and monitoring activities that impact or involve the EA team and organization—and subsequently building trust among the business and IT organizations (which ultimately improves the effectiveness of EA in creating and delivering business value).
• Facilitation: Establishing and promoting standards, best practices, and guidelines for technology adoption and support across organizations in order to advance business and IT strategies; and preparing the process for change management to adopt new technologies.
• Risk Management: Identifying and managing risks associated with the set strategies and objectives, as well as continuously monitoring the risk levels across projects to ensure visibility into critical situations and enable practitioners to make informed decisions.
• Compliance: Linking individual projects and initiatives to enterprise strategies and objectives, as well as measuring, monitoring, and managing the progress of IT projects in delivering the business goals while following EA guidelines and principles.
• Enforcement: Defining and enforcing ways to use architecture patterns and information during the entire lifecycle of major application development, integration, and deployment.
• Most practitioners agree that at the strategic level, EA governance decisions influence and guide IT planning, spending, and investment priorities, as well as the alignment of IT resources in pursuit of the desired business goals. At the tactical level, EA governance decisions support the ability of an organization to mitigate project and enterprise-level architectural risks, constraints, and challenges. From both perspectives, it is essential for practitioners to recognize the significance of a measurement program in making informed EA governance decisions. Today’s volatile economic climate and close scrutiny of governance decisions makes the need for a measurement program even more critical.

EA Measurement Program and Metrics

A measurement program always starts with the identification of a set of consistent and congruent enterprise-level architecture metrics that can be recognized and applied by both business and IT organizations in a transparent, precise, and easy-to-use manner. At a strategic level, EA metrics establish a number of quantifiable parameters that enable practitioners to assess and evaluate IT assets and their relevance to delivering business value for the enterprise. At a tactical level, EA metrics include parameters that impact the enterprise architecture and its effectiveness across the organizations—both directly and indirectly. Leveraging EA metrics in a measurement program, IT practitioners and business stakeholders can measure:

• Benefits delivered as a result of applying or following architecture processes, reference models, frameworks and technology standards.
• The alignment (or the lack thereof) level of an individual project or program with respect to targeted business objectives.
• The ability of each individual project to overcome architecturally significant risks, constraints, and challenges.
• Common architectural risks inherent in the overall architecture planning for business transformation, application rationalization, or legacy modernization initiatives.
• Compliance with EA governance principles, policies, and procedures—noting exceptions as well as waivers.

Six Steps for Leveraging EA Metrics

For practitioners in most large and medium-sized companies, leveraging the metrics for EA governance involves six key steps (see figure 1):

1. Identify: Define the business capabilities that can meet strategic business goals and recognize the enterprise-wide stakeholders, business sponsors, and EA governance body members
2. Establish: Create a blueprint of IT assets that includes inventory of existing resources, infrastructure investments, and architecturally significant technology components
3. Assess: Prioritize the business capabilities and match them with available IT assets to identify any gaps that enterprise architecture must ensure are addressed by ongoing IT projects.

In most cases, these three steps are performed periodically (often on an annual basis). Parameters for EA metrics may include the percentage of blueprint capitalized and the number of architecturally significant components, services or infrastructure elements, reused or shared across the enterprise. Enterprise architects recommend IT spending and investments based on metric parameters such as cost of IT projects to meet specific business goals, savings from the return on existing investments or the reuse of patterns, rationalization or consolidation of IT resources, and cost reduction from technology refreshment or retirement. It is important to note that practitioners often identify some high-risk business goals through a series of cost-benefit-impact analyses conducted as an exercise using the above-mentioned steps.

The next three steps directly support risk management and compliance to architecture governance policies and principles:

1. Measure: Identify risks in various architecture domains or segments and calculate the severity of the risks (high, medium, or low) with respect to the probability of significant architectural impacts throughout the lifecycle of a business portfolio of individual projects.
2. Manage: Evaluate and control the root causes of various risks in each IT project or program area and help associated program management and operational support offices to mitigate such risks.
3. Monitor: Create a scorecard or dashboard to capture the information related to governance compliance such as reuse of technology standards, architectural patterns, best practices, common or shared services, reference models or architectural frameworks adopted across the enterprise.

These three steps play a vital role in assessing the effectiveness of EA as well as the maturity of the overall EA. These steps provide significant insights from the individual projects to perform cost-benefit-impact analyses at the strategic level. Practitioners instill the process of innovation and collaboration across organizations while performing these tasks and demonstrate business/IT alignment through delivery of business solutions in individual projects.

These steps are performed on an ongoing basis and are closely interconnected. Practitioners involved in EA governance usually conduct weekly reviews to determine the levels of oversight needed in each architectural domain as well as in each business portfolio. EA metrics used in these steps ensure that the governance process is occurring and will assist the organization in delivering the targeted business value. Parameters such as the number of open issues and exceptions, as well as non-compliance to architecture principles and project review failures, are also included in the EA metrics for these steps to determine the operational excellence of EA.

In addition to following the above-mentioned steps, leveraging the metrics for EA governance requires practitioners to incorporate industry best practices and take advantage of training and learning opportunities available to the EA community. A number of enterprise architecture planning and modeling tools are available that provide adequate support for utilizing architectural frameworks, governance processes, and compliance aids. EA metrics are intertwined with enterprise (business and IT) strategy planning, release management, and project execution activities, and can be leveraged collaboratively.

by Dr. Tushar K. Hazra, the founder and chief technology officer of EpitomiOne, a leading company in delivering integrated solutions and strategic management consulting service solutions to its customers. He can be reached at 
tkhazra@epitomione.com.