Gartner: How Enterprise Architecture Can Deliver Business Value

A disconnect between the way many organizations pursue enterprise
architecture (EA) and the impact of EA has the business is preventing EA
from delivering business value, according to a report from IT research
firm Gartner. The report suggested EA practitioners need to re-examine
old practices and shift their focus to deliverables that direct change
and empower business and IT leaders to make better decisions.

Gartner has categorized five types of deliverables that could help EA practitioners deliver business value from EA efforts:

1. Measurable deliverables: these specifically measure the direct impact of EA on the business.

2. Actionable deliverables: these drive change and must have a direct relationship to
   business outcomes and stakeholder requirements, and present senior IT
   or business executives with a decision to be made or a specific action
   to be taken that moves the business toward a future state

3. Diagnostic deliverables: these include models, requirements and analysis tools
   that are designed to enable IT and business leaders to understand the
   impact of different decisions made in response to business disruption or
   business opportunity; they combine different views of a problem or
   opportunity to address a specific need.

4. Enabling deliverables: these are composed of information that is collected; they provide input
   to diagnostic deliverables that represent the business, people,
   processes, information and technology, and are collected from existing
   information sources, such as performance metrics, reports from PPM, or a
   business process diagram from BPM.

5. Operational deliverables: these are the artifacts that EA practitioners use to help them define, communicate and run their EA program.

The report notes that EA practitioners need to find the right balance of
resource investment (time, energy and money) between all of these
deliverables, while understanding that stakeholders only value
actionable and measurable deliverables. The deliverables must work with
other business and IT disciplines such as:

• business process management (BPM)

• program and portfolio management (PPM)

• business information (BI)

• finance and human resources

Currently, less than 44 percent of EA organizations worldwide have defined
metrics, the report said, and even fewer are focusing metrics on
business outcomes. It s often the case that many of these
organizations measure what an EA team is doing, for example how many
deliverables created, rather than gauging the impact of EA on the
business, the report said.

To read the original eWeek article, click here: Enterprise Architecture Must Become Business Driven: Gartner