Software Engineering Institute

This report summarizes a workshop on analysis and evaluation of enterprise architectures that was held at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in April of 2010. The SEI invited accomplished practitioners from government and industry to discuss key issues in analyzing and evaluating enterprise architectures. After several opening talks by individuals who presented the state of the practice of enterprise architecture within their own organizations, the group considered a series of questions, including the following: (1) Is there a fundamental difference between analyzing and evaluating enterprise architectures and system of system architectures? (2) How are quality attribute concerns expressed and analyzed in practice for an enterprise architecture? (3) How are enterprise architectures evaluated in practice? For each question, discussion included consideration of the current state of the practice, identification of difficulties sufficient to motivate an organization to seek a solution or an alternative (“pain points”), challenges in current practice, and differences between government and industry contexts. This report summarizes the workshop dialogue and findings, and presents a proposal for an Enterprise Architecture Analysis and Evaluation process.