1. Alignment and Maturity are Siblings in Architecture Assessment
Bas van der Raadt (Capgemini)
Johan F. Hoorn (VU)
Hans van Vliet (VU)
CAiSE 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
Alignment and Maturity are Siblings in Architecture Assessment. Proceedings 17th Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'05), Springer-Verlag, pp