Enterprise Coherence Metrics in Enterprise Decision Making

摘要

Many organizations still struggle to translate strategy into design. Enterprise Architecture (EA) can be regarded as a key function to facilitate strategy execution. General Enterprise Architecting defines enterprise coherence as 'the extent to which all relevant aspects of an enterprise are connected, in such a way that these connections facilitate an enterprise obtaining/meeting its desired results'. There is a growing need to demonstrate the importance and usefulness in terms of the value that EA represents to an organization. Enterprise coherence is currently not measured within enterprises. Graphs are key to understanding systems on a quantitative and predictive basis. The core for enterprise coherence calculation is a graph of interrelated directions and decisions, which we will call the enterprise guidance graph (EGG). Based on EGG we envision an EC-index that takes decisions and guiding statements as input, and gives enterprise coherence as output. Inspiration for networks derived from natural systems has been used to formulate metrics for organizations. The research encompasses an experiment within an international financial company with circa 3000 employees, to understand first behavior of the developed model in practice. We conclude that an instrument for showing and measuring coherence is valued, and that support is given for quantification through the use of graphs, with enterprise coherence being one of the relevant metrics. This research aims to aid in improving structured enterprise engineering.