Just a quick note. I ran across this interesting post from Leo de Sousa, an Enterprise Architect in the Higher Education setting, who uses a Capability Maturity Model to help him to measure and drive EA maturity.
This is one of the most common ways to use measurement to improve Enterprise Architecture. As I pointed out in my post on measurement, EA in every organization needs not only to have a balanced scorecard but also to participate in a balanced scorecard in order for the value to be measured and rewarded. In many ways, a maturity model is a balanced scorecard. Doing better at “maturity” means that your measurement improves. Driving to improve that measure motivates change.
I’ll blog again on this topic. I just wanted to share Leo’s excellent post.
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Nick,
Thanks for the mention of my EA CMM post. If you would like a copy of the docs, please let me know.
I really appreciate the posts you share with us, keep it up!
All the best, Leo
Hi Nick,
I am not sure if you know about the E2AMM but if not, I would guess that it is worth having a look: http://www.enterprise-architecture.info/Images/E2AF/E2AMMv2.PDF
Anyway, I do like your "proof of .." terms 🙂
Problem with the E2AMM (which stands for Extended Enterprise Architecture Maturity Model) is that it is so broad that it is not possible to tell how you would score it.
In other words, there are so many different "effects" of moving from Level 2 to Level 3, for example, that you cannot make a judgement on whether an organization that exhibits some, but not all, of those effects is at Level 2 or Level 3.
Thus, while you could create a different judgement about the maturity of each area, it would not be simple to make a jugement about the overall maturity of architecture from that model.
But don’t you have the same problem with Leo’s model? Leo says you should "Identify 5 stages of maturity", then define attributes and then scroe these attributes (0, 0.5, 1). I absolutelylike this simple approach and agree that the E2AMM is to broad in this context. Why I like the E2AMM is, that it gives you something like a checklist for your attributes. With that in mind you don’t develop your stages and/or attributes on the green field. So maybe a combination of both is worth having but for me the E2AMM presents a good starting point for developing a maturity model. What are your thoughts?