Measuring and Analysing Resilience of Enterprise Architectures

As business environments are increasingly dynamic and are changing rapidly, enterprise architectures have to be more resilient by design in order to cope with disruptions in an efficient and effective way. Although the literature provides multiple suggestions for achieving this, there is a need to assess how resilient an existing enterprise architecture is, what kind of changes are necessary and what the effects of these changes are. Hence, this study has the aim to create a framework – consisting of factors and metrics – which could be used to measure and analyse the resilience of enterprise architectures. The factors and metrics were identified and defined based on a systematic literature review, inferring factors and metrics from other contexts into the context of enterprise architectures. It seems that resilience in this context should be considered as an attribute which could be achieved by four connected abilities: anticipate, monitor, learn and respond. Four factors were identified (vulnerability to risks, agility, adaptability and robustness) which all contribute to at least one of these abilities comprising a process causing resilience. For some of the factors, metrics were also identified.