Enterprise Architecture is understood to benefit business in multiple ways. It helps business to rationalize its processes and applications and establish an enterprise architecture governance, technology standards, processes and best practices. A modern and standard based technology architecture helps better enterprise information sharing, reduce costs and improve ROI and ultimately help executives in making effective business decisions and drive revenue and growth. That being said how do you prove and show business the benefits of enterprise architecture has realized? How do you measure and prove that the enterprise architecture processes that you newly established were successful and had positively impacted the business?
While establishing an enterprise architecture framework, you could capture baselines for your technology, applications, data and infrastructure stacks to measure its value points to the supporting business processes. The process for collecting baselines for enterprise architecture can be achieved by developing work streams for the each strategic business focus area. Individual work stream could then focus on collecting the appropriate baselines and capture KPI’s established on the track. Following are some lists and focus areas that may help you defining your enterprise architecture performance matrix.
Project Portfolio: This track focuses on collecting enterprise wide projects and programs portfolio information. This includes collecting financial performance for all ongoing/open and closed projects, its CPI, SPI and ROI across the enterprise. The process will build a matrix to include data such as project, sponsors, stakeholders, objectives, key success and failures criteria, projects monthly run rates, status closed or open, length of time and resources worked can be monitored.
Business Processes: This track is responsible to identify and deliver an inventory of core business processes and its sub-components, its strategic importance and impact risk analysis such as strategic-high’s, non-differentiate and redundant etc. Sample of the matrix this track will generate are business owners, process owners, number of processes, redundant processes, investments, enhancements etc.
Technology: Responsible for discovery and defining application portfolio analysis, owners, total costs of ownership, number of redundant capabilities, strategic importance and differentiators, quality etc.
People: Capture training requirements, certifications, new and obsolete skills, expertise, thought leadership and innovations held. White papers published, solutions and knowledge management portals, shared document portals etc.
Operation: Capture corporate infrastructures, assets, acquired and disposed, hardware, firmware, upgrades, OS, versions, desktop support, software inventory, telecoms, SLA, call center, support tickets opened, closed, BPO etc.
Security: Discovers and collect information on security threats, number of violations, compliance, SOX and policy related actions or project changes, tickets opened and closed, virus spreads, user provisioning, enterprise identity management, methods of access, effects etc.
Finance: Covers all areas to include above tracks on their investments, ROI, license costs, infrastructure cost, desktop costs, projects and program cost etc. Additionally this track may expand to other business areas such as sales revenue, open and closed orders and receivables, purchasing, operating revenue and income etc.
Business Partners: This track should capture number of contracted third parties and vendors, usage, performance, NDA’s, compliance, trades, types of trade etc. The objective here is to reduce and streamline vendor management and costs.
Enterprise Information: Captures reporting and executive dash board related information such as number of reports per business functions, redundant reports, reporting methods, data variations, data marts, standards and methods, access etc.
Once you have defined your enterprise architecture key performance indicator baseline as above, you could then analyze and compare the outcome with these baselines after establishing enterprise architecture. Whether it is reducing annual call center open tickets, consolidating infrastructure costs, streamlining business processes or providing shared services, you now have some tangible and measurable way to prove the value of enterprise architecture.