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Top1. Introduction
The environment that involves the organization’s business is a dynamic ecosystem, causing rapid changes in many areas, including Information Systems (IS).
Change is a constant in the life of an organization and has evolved to be a critical evolution process itself. Therefore, the ability to manage change becomes a key capability in organizations.
Organizations work best when their components are designed to work together effectively and efficiently. However, the existing approach for carrying out Information Technology (IT) development projects, as well as business change projects, may not correspond to the emerging needs of organizations. Thus, organizations are increasingly looking to EA for support to meet the challenge of change governance.
EA is a possible tool to respond to the need for alignment between business and IT (Venkatraman, Henderson, & Oldach, 1993). EA offers value by allowing informed decision-making about the main structural properties of an organization and its businesses, through the so-called Business-IT alignment. The contribution of EA to the alignment of business with IT depends on the quality of the architecture itself as a whole and the alignment between the domains, aspects, and elements of the architecture in particular. The task of identifying the alignment, or lack of it, between the domains of EA (e.g, business, and information processes) with traditional means involves manual description, review, and comparison of a set of heterogeneous artifacts (e.g., diagrams, text documents, spreadsheets, images) that collectively describe an EA. The more elements there are in each domain EA, the more complex the concept of alignment becomes, as more rules and heuristics need to be defined and applied to manage the relationships between these elements (Sousa, Pereira & Marques, 2004), meaning that the alignment follows the influence and coordination to achieve an objective, coming from different disciplines (Iacob, Quartel, & Jonkers, 2012). Therefore, any changes made to an organization must be aligned to fit the current system or modified to accept the changes.
As a rule, organizations have portfolios, programs, and projects. The portfolio of programs and projects is an instrument that allows, within the scope of the organization's strategic management, to clearly identify the development of activities, so as to achieve the outlined objectives.
This paper contributes for better understanding which projects and programs are most appropriate in the context of the EA of an organization. This research surveys the metrics and heuristics that allow the measurement of the intended qualities in the EA.
This research proposes a library of heuristics that allows to evaluate the alignment of project portfolios to the desired qualities, given a strategy and the objectives of the organization.
This research has the following objectives: 1. Identify the metrics and heuristics that exist in the literature for the evaluation of qualities in Enterprise Architecture. 2. Identify and evaluate quality attributes of a project, through heuristics, and model them in an EA tool. 3. Identify the alignment of the project portfolio in the organization with the EA, through a heuristic library. 4. Apply a library of heuristics to help decide which projects to carry out.
Therefore, in order to address these goals, it is essential to use alignment heuristics as rules to accomplish the alignment of the architectures. In most cases, heuristics are just an alert for a situation that requires additional analysis and justification (Sousa et al., 2004).
In this research, heuristics are used as rules to increase the possibility of achieving greater simplicity in the alignment between EA and its project portfolios.
Thus, this investigation proposes to provide an approach that aims to address the theme of programs and projects in organizations, identifying their alignment with EA and quantifying it, through a library of heuristics, allowing consistency and coherence in monitoring based on heuristics between the elements of an EA. By creating an artifact, i.e., a library of heuristics, it is possible to provide the ability to monitor the validness within the EA models expressed in the ArchiMate modeling language.