The Extended Enterprise Coherence-Governance Assessment

• Published in: Trends in Enterprise Architecture Research and Practice-Driven Research on Enterprise Transformation pp. 218 - 235
• Main Authors: Wagter, Roel, Proper, Henderik A., Witte, Dirk
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• Series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing
• Subjects: business-IT alignment; enterprise architecture; enterprise architecture maturity model; enterprise coherence framework; enterprise coherence-governance assessment
• ISBN: 3642341624; 9783642341625
• ISSN: 1865-1348; 1865-1356
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-34163-2_13

The Enterprise Coherence-governance Assessment (ECA) instrument is a part of the GEA (General Enterprise Architecting) method for enterprise architecture. Based on experiences with this assessment instrument in a range of real world projects, the ECA has been improved, leading to the extended Enterprise Coherence-governance Assessment (eECA). So far, the eECA been applied in 54 organizations with a total of 120 respondents. The paper discusses the context in which the eECA instrument was developed, the instrument itself, as well as the results of the assessment study in which the instrument was applied. The ECA and eECA use the term ‘coherence’ rather than the more common term ‘Business-IT alignment’, since the latter is generally associated with bringing only ‘Business’ and ‘IT’ inline. The word coherence, however, stresses the need to go beyond this. Enterprise coherence involves connections and synchronisation between all important aspects of an enterprise. ‘IT’ and ‘Business’ just being two of these aspects.