On average Dutch Enterprise Architecture products are attractive and provide guidance to the enterprise in times of change. However, they rarely address all issues completely. Only 50% of the Enterprise Architecture products are judged readable. The Enterprise Architecture products are very explicit about their status but do not mention a clear time span for the architecture to be valid or how the architecture should link to the existing enterprise. These are some of the results of a study to assess the quality of Enterprise Architecture products, we conducted in 2005.

For many, the term Enterprise Architecture conjures up visions of colorful models and fat documents with guidelines. These products of the Enterprise Architecture process are indeed its most tangible result. Most architects can intuitively tell which models are the most readable and which guidelines are the strongest but that intuition is not objective enough to produce an independent measure of the quality of an architecture product. Until recently, no such measurement existed. This paper explores the concept of Enterprise Architecture product quality and how to measure it in a scientific manner.