Model and application architecture indicators of evaluation the enterprise architecture

Enterprise Architecture EA provides a "knowledge base and support for decision making within the enterprise and it serves as the blueprint of current situation and strategy for future directions of the enterprise". The planning and modeling aspect of EA is already fairly well covered in the literature, while the evaluation and the attributes of EA quality have attracted less interest and yet enterprise architecture quality has been perceived as a prerequisite for realizing its benefits [6]. The principle goals of EA evaluation are to document the significance of the EA to decision makers, and to identify the development needs of the EA. However it is very difficult to find a complete method of evaluation in term of indicators of evaluation and which ensures the follow-up of all the stages of development of the architecture of company. This article presents a generic model of evaluation enterprise architecture. We do not want to use attributes directly because the model definition could vary in different organizations. Therefore, we introduce this artifact as an intermediate layer as not to limit the flexibility of evaluation. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.