Business Architecture Quantified: How to Measure Business Complexity

Abstract

Complexity of both business and IT is one of the most frequently discussed topics in strategic management and enterprise architecture today. For many business leaders, complexity is of central concern due to its assumed impacts on operating costs, organizational agility, and operational risks. In fact, complexity growth may be considered one of the major drivers for misalignment. As a consequence, organizations are increasingly forced to manage the complexity of their business and IT actively. However, existing qualitative methods fall short of supporting this on a larger scale. Quantitative measures may be considered a promising means to assess and manage the complexity of business and IT architectures in a systematic and universal way. This chapter presents a generic framework for conceptualizing and measuring enterprise architecture complexity and applies it to the domain of business architecture. Using this book’s business architecture framework as a reference, it is shown how business complexity can be operationalized and quantified using well-defined and practice-proven measures.