Modeling the Contribution of Enterprise Architecture Practice to the Achievement of Business Goals

Enterprise architecture is a young, but well-accepted discipline in information management. Establishing the effectiveness of an enterprise architecture practice, however, appears difficult. In this paper we introduce an Architecture Effectiveness Model (AEM) to express how enterprise architecture practices are meant to contribute to the business goals of an organization. We developed an AEM for three different organizations. These three instances show that the concept of the AEM is applicable in a variety of organizations. It also shows that the objectives of enterprise architecture are not to be restricted to financial goals. The AEM can be used by organizations to set coherent priorities for their architectural practices and to define KPIs for measuring the effectiveness of these practices.