Enterprise Architecture Optimization Scenarios Evaluation

Today organizations are a complex system, composed of different types of elements, working together. Given the nature of organizations, they must deal with change, at some point of their lifecycle, in order to improve their activity. Since they are complex systems, deciding what changes to do or not, is not a trivial problem to solve. Furthermore, there may be several enterprise scenarios to choose from in a given situation. In this work we intend to analyse the problem of selecting enterprise scenarios, and propose a methodology to guide and formalize, this kind of analysis. Our methodology is based on the multi criteria analysis, and proposes GQM as a method to select and align metrics with business objectives, and also incorporates SWING, as weighting method in order to compute a global scenario score, from the value of single metrics. Regarding the metrics it is also presented in this thesis a group of metrics that allow to differentiate scenarios based on the quantity of change impact they produce on the overall architecture. Since there are dependencies between enterprise architecture elements, changing an element will in most cases cause the need to change other related elements, and this is change impact is what the proposed metrics aim to quantify.