Few enterprise architecture (EA) programs fully realize the goal of significantly improving IT/business strategy alignment. Companies that are successful with EA are able to overcome organizational, political, and cultural divisions and gain broad consensus across the enterprise. However, this cannot be achieved "overnight"; it requires a mature approach.

Assessing the maturity of your architecture program is a prerequisite for continuously improving the value that EA delivers to the enterprise. Eight dimensions characterize an EA program's maturity. These characteristics address the maturity of the EA program, not the enterprise architecture.

According to Gartner, the following are important dimensions of EA program maturity:

Architecture scope and authority: A common understanding and approach to the business strategy across the enterprise must drive a mature architecture program. To succeed, the program must support business change across multiple programs, business units, and even companies. Success in this dimension requires optimizing end-to-end processes, implementing a common infrastructure and creating appropriate governance structures.

Stakeholder involvement and support: The involvement and support of key stakeholders — including enterprise senior executives and IT managers, along with key members of the enterprise's lines of business and the wider architecture community — are critical to program maturity. Key to fostering this support is clear and accessible communication of the EA, tailored to the needs of different stakeholder groups.

Architecture definition process: This process should be well defined, clearly articulated and pragmatically executed — using regular iterations to progressively expand the EA's scope, and to improve and update its individual elements. This process should also involve appropriate stakeholders, and be integrated with related processes such as business planning and IT portfolio management.

Business context: Mature EA programs are explicitly linked to the business strategy and demonstrate they deliver business value.

Architecture content: Expression of the EA should address three basic viewpoints — business, information and technology — and how these viewpoints combine to create solutions. It should also address three levels — conceptual, logical and implementation — moving from high-level to detailed expressions of the architecture.

Future-state realization: The most-mature architecture programs are actionable — defining, planning and initiating the projects that will be executed to achieve the defined future state.

Architecture team resources: Because the talents and skills that a successful enterprise architect must possess are in short supply, a focus on recruiting talented individuals and providing the necessary professional development and training is key. It is also important for architects in complex and sophisticated environments to have tools to help them understand the range of information assets, relate these assets to each other and to the business strategy, and communicate this information to stakeholders.

Architecture impact: To improve EA program effectiveness, sophisticated metrics — including measures of financial efficiency and business effectiveness — should be used to measure the program’s impact on the business. (Gartner, 2008)

Understanding the maturity of an EA program is of little use unless this understanding serves as the starting point for change. The process for improving an EA program's maturity should include the following steps:

A current-state assessment of program maturity
Critical-constraint analysis to identify the factors that limit the options for improvement
Maturity target setting, a process of identifying specific improvement goals, while balancing practical considerations such as business priorities, required resources, and the enterprise’s culture and capacity for process change
Improvement planning, based on the identification of gaps between the current and desired states (see Figure 1), and of the transformation steps required to bridge them
Adopting a continuous-improvement process for the ongoing enhancement of the EA program

Figure 3: Sample Mapping of Current and Target Maturity Levels Source: Gartner (November 2005)