A recent article by Michael J Mauboussin on HBR reminded me my answer on Quora to this same question, so I realised that that answer should really be published on my own blog, and not somewhere else. That is the motivation for this post.
Don’t look for a magical set, you need to develop your own. Here is one practical technique to achieve this, it starts with a statement of purpose that you should make people feel comfortable with.
An effective Enterprise Architecture helps ensure that an organisation spends money wisely, that resource allocation is done in a way that supports your business growth. It should be an instrument for your most powerful decision makers. The scope is massive, this spans every tidbit of information that flows through your way of doing business, it is about your entire chain of information systems (in the widest sense of the term). It goes therefore that you need to know how resource is allocated (respectively how value is created), what the triggers are and how those triggers can be influenced. Your Enterprise Architecture practice must identify and use the levers that control these events and event triggers, for it to be effective.
With the above statements in mind, proceed as follows:
- List the metrics that have the most impact/visibility in your organisation’s success, put them in a priority order that makes the most sense to your best people. This works best if you interview and discuss with a mix of key people: people with good delivery track record, people most intimate with your business, and people with powerful decision making power. Don’t look outside your organisation for such a list, you might quickly fall into an anti-pattern trap.
- Now armed with your prioritised list, benchmark where you are as you start this exercise, take snapshots of these metrics at regular intervals. Define the intervals to closely match your business activity cycle: from resource allocation to value creation. Start with a high frequency (must be realistic though), and adjust the sampling frequency as necessary, compare the measures every time and with varying sampling windows.
- Share the intermediate results you are getting with the people you worked with in Step 1). Try to gather their feedback on the measures that are starting to show, look for trends. Don’t hesitate to change the metric priorities, drop what doesn’t make sense.
- As you gain insights into what is driving effectiveness, try to make small educated changes to the metrics, and perform Step 2) and 3) again.
This is rather crude, but if done right, some solid metrics will rapidly emerge for you, and your process in itself embodies an educational and buy-in mechanism, which reinforces your Enterprise Architecture effectiveness.