Business Architecture Current State Assessment

Everyone Has an Opinion About the Practice. Nobody Has a Score.

The Business Architecture Current State Assessment is a scored self-assessment — roughly 90 questions across 16 dimensions — that turns a general sense of how the practice is doing into a specific, defensible picture of where it is strong, where it is thin, and what to fix first.

Business architecture practices are usually evaluated by anecdote. The last program that went well is evidence the practice works; the last one that did not is evidence it does not. Neither tells a practice lead where to invest.

The reason is that "how mature is our practice" is too large a question to answer directly. Broken into dimensions — governance, tooling, stakeholder engagement, artifact quality, adoption, the rest — it becomes a set of questions each with an honest answer, and the pattern across them is the diagnosis.

This is a different kind of product from the models in this catalog. Those are content you customize; this is an instrument you run. It produces a score, a profile across the 16 dimensions, and an ordered list of what is worth addressing.

It is most useful when the answer matters to someone other than you — a sponsor deciding whether to fund the practice, or a new leader working out what they have inherited.

What an Assessment Settles That an Opinion Does Not

Three conversations get easier once the practice has a score rather than a reputation.

Where to invest next. A profile across 16 dimensions shows which weakness is actually holding the practice back. Most practices are strong somewhere and thin somewhere else, and the thin part is rarely the part people complain about.

What a sponsor is funding. "The practice needs more investment" is a request. A dimension-level score with specific gaps is a case, and it survives the sponsor asking what changed since last time.

What a new leader has inherited. Running the assessment in the first weeks of a new role produces a baseline that is not colored by having been responsible for it. That baseline is worth more later than it feels at the time.

Why Assess Now Rather Than Later

Business architecture practices are being asked to justify themselves more explicitly than they were a few years ago, at the same time as the work itself is changing.

A Baseline Is Only Available Before the Change

An assessment run after a reorganization or a tooling change measures the result, not the delta. The value of a baseline is that it exists beforehand, which is the one property that cannot be recovered later.

Practices Are Being Asked to Show Their Work

Architecture functions sit awkwardly in cost reviews because their output is enabling rather than direct. A dimension-level maturity profile is one of the few artifacts that answers the question in the terms the reviewer is asking it.

Generative Tooling Changes What Good Looks Like

If drafting artifacts is becoming cheap, the dimensions that distinguish a strong practice shift toward governance, adoption, and stakeholder engagement — the parts that were never about production speed. An assessment across all 16 dimensions surfaces that shift rather than hiding it.

Scores Are Comparable to Themselves

Run annually, the same instrument shows movement. That is a weaker claim than an external benchmark and a considerably more honest one.

What Is Included

Two files, both editable:

Who This Is Built For

There is a companion Enterprise Architecture Current State Assessment covering the EA practice on the same 16-dimension structure. If your remit spans both, the two are designed to be run together; if it covers one, buy that one.

How to Put It to Work

• Score the practice across all 16 dimensions and read the profile, not just the total.
• Identify the two or three dimensions where improvement would unblock the most.
• Build an investment case in dimension-level terms a sponsor can evaluate.
• Re-run annually to show movement against your own baseline.

Where Practices Typically Start

What You Are Actually Buying

Building a credible assessment instrument is harder than it looks. The questions have to be answerable honestly, the dimensions have to be genuinely distinct, and the scoring has to survive someone trying to game it.

• The structure is the work. Sixteen distinct dimensions with roughly 90 questions distributed across them, already balanced.
• It is editable, not locked. Cut what does not apply and add what does — the scoring survives the edit.
• It is repeatable. The same instrument run annually is what turns a one-off score into a trend.

Those first two columns describe what comparable efforts tend to involve, not a quoted benchmark — your figures will depend on scope and who does the work.

Built From Real Engagements

We are software entrepreneurs and business consultants who have delivered business architecture and transformation work across financial services firms. The dimensions and questions come from that work rather than from a published maturity standard — which is also why they carry the opinions and limits described below.

An Honest Note on Fit

This is a self-assessment. That is its main strength — you can run it whenever you like, as often as you like — and its main limitation, which is worth being clear about before you buy.

Where an independent read matters more than a repeatable one, our consulting team can run an assessment on a paid basis instead.

Specifically:

Terms You Should Know Before Purchasing

Read the description above in full before you buy. Delivery is immediate and the files are yours to keep, which is also why we cannot take returns, issue refunds, or swap a purchase for a different product once it has been downloaded. What you receive is what is listed — no warranty beyond that, and no bundled customization, implementation help, or support. A Enterprise License covers everyone inside one organization; if you intend to reuse the material across several clients, the Consultancy License is the one you need. The full digital product terms govern the sale.