Drivers and Metrics for Quantifying IT Landscape Complexity

Mastering complexity is an important topic within the field of Enterprise Architecture (EA), and many companies perceive this as a difficult endeavour due to the growth and perpetual evolution of the Information Technology (IT) landscape. Numerous EA frameworks and methods exist that describe what an IT landscape is. However, there is no consensus regarding the definition of IT landscape complexity, its drivers and how to measure it. To help create a better understanding of what IT landscape complexity entails, this paper reviews established EA literature regarding the common elements of such an IT landscape and investigates prevalent drivers and metrics to quantify complexity. This paper introduces a standard way of describing the IT landscape through a conceptual model, focusing on the elements in the application layer. Furthermore, the prevalent IT complexity drivers and metrics are illustrated. The aim of this research is to support organisations in communication and architecting information systems by considering different kinds of IT elements and their particular characteristics, such as connectivity, adaptation, and complexity. Then, a discussion on how the drivers and metrics of complexity can be used to quantify the complexity of such an IT landscape follows. Our approach is a first step towards better processes for managing complexity. This research supports mastering complexity by allowing organisations to quantify IT landscape complexity when aligning their architectures with the proposed conceptual model.