In the software development industry, technical debt is regarded as a critical issue in term of the negative consequences such as increased software development cost, low product quality, decreased maintainability, and slowed progress to the long-term success of developing software. However, despite the vast research contributions in technical debt management for software engineering, the idea of technical debt fails to provide a holistic consideration to include both IT and business aspects. Further, implementing an enterprise architecture (EA) project might not always be a success due to uncertainty and unavailability of resources. Therefore, we relate the consequences of EA implementation failure with a new metaphor --Enterprise Architecture Debt (EA Debt). We anticipate that the accumulation of EA Debt will negatively influence EA quality, also expose the business into risk.
Ylimäki goes even further and defines twelve critical success factors for Enterprise Architecture. These factors obviously influence EA and its quality, although they are different to previously known aspects. Here high-quality EA is described with: high-quality EA conforms to the agreed and fully understood business requirements, fits for its purpose (e.g. a more efficient IT decision making), and satisfies the key stakeholder groups’ (the top management, IT management, architects, IT developers, and so forth) expectations in a cost-effective way understanding both their current needs and future requirements'' @cite_22 .
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First published in the Journal of Enterprise Architecture, Vol. 2, No. 4, 2006 pp. 29-40. Republished with the kind permission of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture