Rodrigues, L.S. e Amaral, L., 2010. "Value Trees Usefulness in Assessment of Enterprise Architectures Value". In: Proceedings of 15th IBIMA Conference (6-7/November 2010), Cairo, Egypt. ISBN: 978-0-9821489-4-5. Value Trees usefulness in assessment of Enterprise Architectures value Luis Silva Rodrigues, ISCAP/IPP & U. Minho, Porto, Portugal, LSR@iscap.ipp.pt Luis Amaral, U. Minho, Guimarães, Portugal, amaral@dsi.uminho.pt Abstract In last two decades a significant number of organizations began to build Enterprise Architectures in order to deal with complexity and change, to align business and IT, to cut costs and several other objectives. The current economic pressures and the significant investment that Enterprise Architectures represents are increasingly demanding an assessment and demonstration of their usefulness and value. Despite the need and interest there still is no consensus on how to demonstrate the value. Some value models and methods have already been presented but they are still not detailed enough to be used and require further research to be useful for most organizations. In this paper, we present an initial discussion about the usefulness of value drivers and value trees as a way to measure the Enterprise Architectures value. Keywords: Enterprise Architecture, Value, Value Drivers, Value Trees. Introduction In last two decades a significant number of organizations began to build Enterprise Architectures in order to deal with complexity and change, to align business and IT, to cut costs and several other objectives. An Enterprise Architecture can be defined and conceptualized in many ways. According to TOGAF (TheOpenGroup, 2009) an architecture is a formal description of a system, or a detailed plan of the system at component level to guide its implementation. From this perspective, an Enterprise Architecture is a formal description (a complete model) of an organization that brings together a collection of documents which describes all aspects of the organization, taking into account the perspectives of different groups or users. This formal description can be a description of the organization’s current state and/or the desired future state. Given the current economic pressures and the significant investment that Enterprise Architectures represents there is a growing need of an assessment and demonstration of their usefulness and value. However, despite this need and interest there still is no consensus on Enterprise Architectures value and the value assessment still is a very difficult and complex process for most organizations. In our view the main issues that contributes for the difficulty and complexity of value assessment are: (1) the lack of a clear definition of what is meant by value, (2) the different value views from stakeholders, (3) the lack of a clear understanding on what are the most important value factors and how they can/must be measured, and (4) the organizations need to quickly demonstrate the Enterprise Architectures value. In the little literature available, the discussion of the value proposition is mainly focused on the Enterprise Architectures benefits and how they can be quantified; however, it is important to emphasize that value is more comprehensive than the benefits. The value results from a balance between what is gained and what is lost and the key to demonstrate the value of one Enterprise Architecture is relating the investment in its construction and maintenance to the incremental achievement of business outcomes. At this moment, some approaches, some value models and methods have been presented and/or suggested (e.g., (Kluge et al., 2006; Rico 2006; Schekkerman, 2005; Schelp and Stutz, 2007)), however there still are no clear evidence of its usefulness, much by the fact that many of these proposals do not have enough detail to allow its replication in others organizations. In other hand, these approaches do not address most of the value assessment issues mentioned above; therefore in this following section we briefly present and discuss one other approach, the value trees approach, which in our view may be very useful to address those issues.