An Enterprise Architecture Approach for Assessing the Alignment Between Projects and Goals

Enterprise architecture existing approaches are expected to support the organization's evolution from a current state to a future one. Although some researches address the identification of the alignment between projects and strategic objectives, the measurement and quantification of this architectural alignment, considering the information system architecture quality attributes, is not usually considered when defining or implementing projects. This paper contributes to fulfil this gap by extending Archimate enterprise architecture framework and proposing a 4-step approach for assessing the alignment between enterprise projects and goals, namely 1) identify the alignment between the projects and the strategic objectives, 2) identify the quality attributes derived from the strategic objectives, 3) identify the applicable metrics to the projects' architecture, 4) quantify the alignment level between the projects and the strategic objectives. The results show that it is possible to use enterprise architecture for selecting projects that have higher impact on the company's strategy.