What is it about?
Enterprise architecture helps organisations understand how their business processes, data, applications, and technologies fit together. But many organisations still struggle to evaluate whether their architecture is actually good, useful, secure, scalable, adaptable, or aligned with business goals. This publication reviews existing research on enterprise architecture evaluation methods. It analyses a large body of academic work to understand what has already been proposed, what criteria are commonly used, how architecture is represented and assessed, which methods have been tested in practice, and where important research gaps remain. The review shows that better automation, data collection, and practical evaluation support are key to making enterprise architecture evaluation more useful for real organisations.
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Why is it important?
Organisations invest heavily in enterprise architecture to guide technology decisions, reduce risk, support change, and align IT with business goals. However, without systematic evaluation, it is difficult to know whether an architecture is truly effective or only well documented. This review is important because it brings together and analyses existing research on enterprise architecture evaluation methods, showing what has already been studied and where the field still needs progress. It highlights that many current tools are strong in modelling and visualisation, but weaker in practical evaluation support. The work also points to automation, better data collection, and clearer evaluation criteria as key steps toward making enterprise architecture evaluation more useful for real organisations.
Perspectives
This publication represents a key part of my research journey because it gives me a broad view of how enterprise architecture evaluation is currently studied and where the field still needs to evolve. For me, the most important insight is that organisations do not only need better architecture models; they also need practical ways to evaluate whether those architectures are effective, adaptable, secure, scalable, and aligned with business goals. This review helps connect academic research with real organisational needs and supports my ongoing work on more systematic, scenario-based, and tool-supported approaches to enterprise architecture evaluation.
Norbert Rudolf Busch
Warsaw University of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Systematic Literature Review of Enterprise Architecture Evaluation Methods, ACM Computing Surveys, January 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3706582.
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