For me measurement is about PROVING EA's value and you need good business aligned measures to do that. To get really good business aligned measures you need to understand how each business stakeholder measures success - ask how do they get their bonus and then how is EA contributing to that. Here are some examples I recently published on www.gartner.com :
• Percentage increase in market share
• Improved time to market for new products
• Target Market Index = Relative market size X (1 + relative market growth rate)
• Market Coverage Index = The number of countries an organization sells in weighted by size of revenue/target market global industry revenue
• Number of new processes identified and improved
• Number of environmental /industry trends articulated in future state architecture
• R&D Success Index = New products launched in past 12 months
• Number of new business plans with EA involvement
• Increased anytime, anywhere anyway access to information
• Market Share Index = Revenue of organization's offered products and services/ total revenue of ISIC-code selected industries
• Percentage of time each EA role in strategic and business planning process
• The Product Portfolio Index (identifies and validates current and projected customer needs in existing and targeted markets).
• Opportunity/Threat Index = Sum (Market Share Index for top five revenue leaders)
• Customer Care Performance = Customer care requests within SLA/total customer care requests
However, the BIG challange in EA measurement is not metrics.
Having good metrics is important but the big problem is defining EA's contribution to any metric - this is the biggest challange, and for many EA teams, it becomes an insurmountable task. There is often no direct link between the work done by EA and the successful end result - many other things contribute along the way and there is often a significant time lag between EA planning and benefits realisation at the end of a project. Quantitative methods for collecting measurement data for EA are often unconvincing, because there is no direct one-on-one link between these metrics and EA contribution.
Try the "before and after approach", before EA was in place or yearly, as EA matures — and compare them to subsequent results. Alternatively, collect metrics that relate to business performance with EA versus performance without EA.
The important difference is that no claims should be made that these improvements are the direct causative result of the EA program. Such a connection cannot be proved, but explicit linkages must be made. The various improvements may come from many other sources.
Often EA needs a scoping activity at Gartner we call this step the Business Context and its output is the Common Requirements Vision (CRV) - for this iteration what are our scope, goals, vision and requirements then start the future state/current state analysis. If you have the strategies and business sucess areas you are focussed on defined up front then you can PROVE that the business strategies were impacted by EA (hopefully successfully). If you have no scope or objective what can you measure your success against?
Take what is possible by association. The evidence submitted becomes circumstantial evidence. EA is likely to have caused these effects, but the link cannot be proved. This association is a positive thing. We make an effort to show "probable cause" that EA led to the desired improvements and leave it at that.
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