Whitepaper
Decision Support for Managing the Enterprise Architecture
Using evaluation frameworks for critical assessment of architecture issues and elements
October 2006
Introduction
As the IT architecture of an enterprise changes and develops, decisions need to be made that often have a significant impact on the future ability of the enterprise to execute its business. Decisions need to be based on comprehensive assessments that consider all of the relevant aspects of the issue at hand. Not only one-off evaluations but also on-going assessments are necessary as management mechanisms. By unveiling the strengths and weaknesses of the architecture, opportunities and threats for the enterprise can be identified and improvements instigated.
- Some examples for architectural aspects that can be analyzed are:
- Service quality of business services provided by applications
- Efficiency of business processes supported by applications
- Risks associated with various elements in the business and/or IT architecture such as business processes, applications or project proposals
- Standardization levels of components or standard platforms
- Architectural viability of proposed solutions
- Business relevance of submitted demands
planningIT provides a rich, generic approach that embraces these assessment needs. The generic approach has the advantage of providing full configuration flexibility to the customer so that evaluation criteria and dimensions are defined according to the enterprise’s individual needs.
Additionally, the assessment framework enables a uniform methodology for comparing results across a wide variety of subject areas, business units and IT elements.
The planningIT assessment framework is made up of the following elements:
- Indicators: Indicators are the most elementary expression in planningIT’s assessment hierarchy. This is where values are assigned which can then be fed into larger assessment aspects. In support of assessment standards for the organization, indicators represent standard categories of analysis across, for example, object classes or organizations. Indicator values are obtained in the following manner:
- Manually entered
- Imported from an external system through an automatic interface (for example, incidence counts from an ITIL-compliant incident management system)
- Aggregated from other indicators already defined in planningIT
- Computed from information that is captured (fort example, the number of information flows supported through an application).
Indicators may also be used as visualization aids in architecture diagrams in planningIT.
- Evaluation type: An evaluation type is a conglomeration of indicators. The value for the evaluation type is computed as the average of the values for the subordinated indicators.
- Prioritization scheme: A prioritization scheme is a conglomeration of evaluation types. The value is the weighted sum of the subordinated evaluation types.
- Portfolio: Portfolios are used to represent the relative performance of a set of applications according to three independent dimensions of performance measurement. The performance measurement dimensions themselves are aggregate measures of three prioritization schemes allowing for convenient graphical analysis of performance of a collection of objects from the same class in Boston Matrices or Portfolio Diagrams.
The initial configuration of planningIT contains typical indicators, evaluation types, prioritization schemes and IT portfolios that are predefined and assigned to certain object classes. This configuration can be modified to fit the organization’s specific requirements using planningIT’s configuration module.
Following, three use case scenarios are discussed that use planningIT’s assessment framework to analyze the enterprise architecture.
