Business Architecture Current State Audit | Capstera

The Business Architecture Current State Audit is a self-assessment questionnaire — about 90 questions spread across 16 dimensions, each question with four answer choices — for scoring where a business architecture practice actually stands today. It's a do-it-yourself instrument: your team answers the questions, tallies the points per dimension, and ends up with a quantified picture instead of an impression.

It's for business architecture leaders, EA directors, and transformation offices who want a baseline before they propose changing anything. Before a change effort, a training push, or a pitch for more headcount, it helps to know — with some rigor — which parts of the practice are working and which are being carried by one or two people's effort.

The instrument doesn't tell you what to fix or how; it tells you where to look. What you do with a low score on, say, governance or stakeholder engagement is still a judgment call for your organization to make. That distinction matters: a lot of business architecture maturity conversations stay at the level of a general feeling that things could be better, and a scored, multi-dimensional questionnaire replaces that feeling with something more specific to argue from.

Because the questions are answered by people, not pulled from a system, the result depends on who's asked. A single architect's view of "how well is strategy integration working" and a business stakeholder's view of the same question can differ substantially, and both are useful data points rather than one being the correct answer.

What's Inside

• About 90 assessment questions, four answer choices each, spread across 16 dimensions
• Leadership Support
• Awareness and Adoption
• Integration with Strategy Execution
• Methodology and Frameworks
• Collaboration with Other Architectural Domains
• Organizational Structure
• Deliverables Quality and Utility
• Cross-Mapping and Integration
• Team Composition and Competence
• Performance Metrics
• Governance
• Training and Development
• Stakeholder Engagement
• Scalability
• Technology Utilization
• Agility and Dynamism

How Teams Use It

An EA director distributes the questionnaire to architects across several business units rather than filling it out solo, so the score reflects more than one person's vantage point, then aggregates the responses into a single set of dimension scores. A transformation office runs the assessment before kicking off a year of practice improvements and again afterward, using the two score sets as a simple before-and-after. A newly hired business architecture leader uses the lowest-scoring dimensions to decide what to tackle in the first quarter instead of guessing from a handful of conversations. A CIO or CTO's office pairs the completed self-assessment with the included guide to make the case, internally, for expanding or formalizing the practice. A practice lead preparing for an internal audit or governance review uses the scored dimensions as a structured way to answer "how mature are we" instead of relying on anecdote.

Format & Delivery

The assessment questionnaire is delivered as an editable Word document, together with "A Practical Guide to Business Architecture" as a companion PDF. The product is the assessment instrument itself — it doesn't include benchmarking against other companies' scores, and it doesn't include recommendations or a remediation plan; those are offered separately as consulting engagements. Download is instant after purchase, and licensing options — including an enterprise license — are available.

A generic 16-dimension framework won't map perfectly onto every organization's structure — some dimensions may carry more weight at your company than others, and that's a judgment your team applies when interpreting the scores.

A single completed questionnaire is a snapshot, not a trend line. The real value shows up on the second pass, run a year or so after the first, when the same 16 dimensions and the same scoring scale let you see which parts of the practice actually moved and which stayed flat despite whatever effort went into them in between.