Alignment and Maturity are Siblings in Architecture Assessment

1. Alignment and Maturity are Siblings in Architecture Assessment Bas van der Raadt (Capgemini) Johan F. Hoorn (VU) Hans van Vliet (VU) CAiSE 2005 - Wed. June 15 - Session 2A - 14:00 to 14:30

2. Introduction • Enterprise Architecture (EA) to structure and improve complex situations • Practical problems with EA, e.g.: • Getting organizational acceptance • Finding proper resources (human and other) • Etc. • Desire to identify these problems through an architecture assessment • Create roadmap for improvement

3. Agenda • Introduction to Alignment and Maturity • Existing architecture assessment models • Multi-dimensional architecture assessment (MAAM) • Visualization of MAAM tool • Example of assessment questionnaire • Assessment process • Summary & conclusions

4. Alignment and Maturity • Architecture alignment is the fit between: • business and IT strategy • organizational and IT processes and structures • Architecture maturity is the ability to organization-wide manage the development, implementation and maintenance of architectures on various levels: • Business • Information • Information Systems • Infrastructure

5. Existing models • Luftman’s alignment assessment: • Based on 6 variables: communications, competency/value, governance, partnership, skills, and scope & architecture • 5 alignment levels • Per variable 6 or 7 questions to determine level • Gartner and METAGroup maturity models: • Same structure as Luftman’s model • Comparable variables: process, governance, communication, technology, business IT linkage (alignment) • 5 maturity levels • Comparable questions to determine maturity levels

6. Existing models • See either Alignment as explaining variable for Maturity, or vice versa • Allow one-dimensional assessments • Does not give sufficient insight • E.g. Human health assessment via Body Mass Index requires two dimensions (Height and weight) • Assign an organization an alignment or maturity level • Reaching the next level could become a goal

7. MAAM • Two-dimensional (Alignment & Maturity) • Alignment en Maturity equally important variables • 6 explaining sub-variables: • Architecture development process • Architecture governance • Organizational support • Communication via and about architecture • Architecture scope • Human and other resources

8. MAAM

9. MAAM tool (visualization) Business management Architecture alignment IT department Architecture maturity

10. MAAM tool (questionnaire)

11. Assessment process • Gather data within different domains using the questionnaire • Cluster individual questionnaires and identify groups and their differences • Discuss these differences and their causes with involved management and architects • Identify solutions for getting ‘on the right track’

12. Summary and conclusions • MAAM • Multi-dimensional (Alignment & Maturity) • Allows a more complete architecture assessment that identifies the ‘direction’ in which an organization moves • Based on existing models and improved by new theories from preliminary work (ICSE2004)

13. References • Polyphony in Architecture, Proceedings 26th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE2004), IEEE, pp 533-542 • Alignment and Maturity are Siblings in Architecture Assessment. Proceedings 17th Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'05), Springer-Verlag, pp 357-371