Abstract
What is the Enterprise Architectures value and how it can be assessed and demonstrated has been a topic subject to an interesting discussion among practitioners and researchers. Although this discussion has continued for several years, there is still no consensus about what the value of an Enterprise Architecture is and how it can be demonstrated. The lack of a clear understanding of the concept of value, the need to consider different views (of stakeholders) in assessing the value, the difficulty in identifying the key variables that contribute to the value and how and on what terms they should be measured and, finally, the organization‟s need to quickly prove the architecture‟s value are, in our opinion, the main issues contributing to the complexity and difficulty in assessing the Enterprise Architecture‟s value. In this article we discuss these main issues on value assessment and we make an introductory reference to an approach based on Enterprise Architecture value drivers that is being studied and which may be useful to mitigate these problems and, consequently, used in value assessment of Enterprise Architectures.
Journal of Enterprise Architecture