Enterprise Architecture was initially introduced as a way of understanding and managing a business’s technological assets. Businesses wanted a detailed picture of their system landscape and to know how its technological assets supported its business processes. Enterprise architects were required to paint this picture through modelling the existing architecture. Hence, Enterprise Architecture was mainly driven by the internal requirements and processes of a business. That has since changed dramatically as businesses have become more customer oriented.
Businesses are now driven by customer expectations to a much higher degree than before. EA has evolved accordingly, becoming a more strategic exercise in the sense that the future state of the business has to be designed to deliver maximum value to the customer. In this light, EA has now become a driver for digital transformation and innovation. Naturally, the role of the Enterprise Architect has also grown with Enterprise Architects now expected to introduce innovative ways of structuring the business’s technological assets in a way that takes maximum advantage of the data available to the business.
Emerging technologies must be identified, evaluated, and mapped to the business’s operating model to discover new opportunities. This must be done cautiously as not all new technologies are inherently suitable for the business purely because it is cutting edge. Hence, an Enterprise Architect requires an intimate knowledge of the business’s operating models, stakeholder goals, and strategy to identify the most relevant technology for the business. In the past, an Enterprise Architect could get away with confining themselves to technical spaces, whereas the future Enterprise Architect must have a level of competence in business.
EA may initially start as a reactive exercise in an effort to adapt to changes in the business environment; however, the ultimate goal is to construct a proactive approach to dealing with pending change. For instance, Enterprise Architecture should result in the business having the agility to deal with unforeseen circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic. There should be a clear blueprint of your business and all of its moving parts in order to reliably etch out a way forward from any situation.
EA is not only about supporting strategy execution but also about assisting in the development of said strategies. The new technologies available to Enterprise Architects allow them to gain information about the business and its customers that can inform the development of new strategies. Such aspects will soon become prerequisites of any Enterprise Architecture program. In essence, Enterprise Architects will become internal management consultants responsible for end-to-end strategic technology integration.
The evolution of EA within the organization will not be a natural by-product of simply practicing EA within the organization but must be aggressively pursued. The maturity of the EA program will be reflected in the IT modernization efforts of the business as it adapts to a changing world. It is important to point out that since different parts of a business can be in different stages of modernization, the Enterprise Architect must support all of these transitional periods simultaneously.
Enterprise Architecture is still relatively young as a discipline. However, the increasing complexity faced by businesses globally is beginning to carve out a critical need for EA. With the introduction of new technologies occurring faster than ever, businesses need a structured way of adapting to change swiftly. This chapter explores how EA suits this need perfectly and what the future holds for Enterprise Architects.
New Challenges to Face
In a rapidly changing world, businesses are faced with new environmental realities. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 was the biggest trigger of these new realities. Businesses had to reimagine how they would run their organizations internally in terms of managing/supporting their staff and externally in terms of delivering services to their customers in the way most appealing to them. Even businesses that had plans for the greater adoption of online transactions had to accelerate their plans significantly. It was a reminder to most businesses that they cannot predict the future. Businesses should be agile enough to adapt to anything, and I mean anything. However, there are a few challenges standing in the way of most businesses.
The first challenge is EA itself. The new circumstances we face require EA to evolve to adequately tackle those new circumstances. This goes for businesses that have been actively practicing EA and those businesses looking to start practicing EA. Are frameworks such as the Zachman Framework first developed in 1987 still relevant? Granted, it has been updated over time, but it may be time to start with something from scratch – a completely new design instead of a redesign. Of course, how EA is implemented in the business will depend on the context of the business. Whatever the case may be, the EA program must be suited to the current climate.
The new realities the business faces result in the second challenge, which is dealing with increased complexity. With more businesses delivering services and managing their operations online, migrating to the cloud has taken center stage. Most organizations are likely to adopt a hybrid strategy by having some applications in the cloud and others on premise. This increased complexity begets more complexity such as the new security measures that have to be taken to secure technological assets. Some businesses may need to completely redesign their business processes and operating models to survive. Enterprise Architects will be tasked with navigating the business through the increased complexity introduced by these new realities.
Another challenge is that of the demand for a multicloud approach to serve the global market. Serving the global market means understanding the differing technology policies and legislature between countries. Particular cloud service providers may not operate in certain countries (China being a popular example), meaning the same business may have to engage different cloud service providers to serve markets in different countries. More commonly, we are more likely to see a multicloud approach taken in regard to a business continuity plan and having backups on different cloud service providers. Cybersecurity and data protection may face the same challenges when serving a global market. All of these factors introduce complexity that was nonexistent at the inception of EA. The architecture must account for all of this complexity and continue to support your customers seamlessly.
With the introduction of decentralized systems, working from home, and outsourcing of services, it will become more and more of a challenge to maintain an enterprise-wide view of the business. With stakeholder management being one of the keys to successfully implement an EA program, this becomes more difficult when all of the employees are not accessible in a central location. Furthermore, employees scattered across the globe will present language barriers and cultural differences that may make it difficult to communicate effectively. All of this may lead the Enterprise Architect to only solely focusing on the parts of your business that they’re comfortable with. Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Architects will now have to be equipped with the skills required to build synergy across multiple cultures, decentralized locations, and differing economic environments.
The final challenge is that of skills. The skills required of an Enterprise Architect have increased dramatically. Historically, the Enterprise Architect’s skillset would lean more toward IT, but with EA becoming more of a driver of strategy, it is imperative that the Enterprise Architect has a high level of business acumen. The modern-day Enterprise Architect is a combination of a solutions architect and a management consultant expected to comfortably lead a conversation with the CIO and the CFO equally. This kind of skillset will be difficult to find, with most people generally preferring to be specialist in one area or the other. Additionally, the Enterprise Architect must possess strong soft skills to facilitate stakeholder management. The EA skillset is broad and encompasses business domain knowledge, technologies, project management experiences, and organizational skills. This skillset will certainly be in short supply.
What to Expect?
Enterprise Architecture cannot predict the future. Nothing can. However, there can be an estimation of some scenarios that are likely to play out in the future and incorporate intelligence into our architecture that enables a proactive approach to change through providing strategic data-driven insights. This, combined with an agile architecture, will allow the organization to adapt to change quicker than most. This section will highlight some of the trends and expectations that will color the future.
An Expanded EA Scope
As has already been alluded to, the expectations of EA will increase considerably. What was mostly considered an IT discipline will truly become an enterprise-wide one. The importance of technology in driving business value is paramount in a digital world. EA will form the crux of an even greater alignment between business and IT. EA will incorporate activities that extract deeper insights into the business domain in an effort to identify technologies that not only align to business capabilities but also help identify emerging capabilities and opportunities. The business’s architecture will incorporate intelligence that gathers insights that can inform strategy development. So, whereas EA was purely about strategy execution, its scope will now include strategy development. EA will be expected to deliver greater tangible business value.
Digital Transformation Will Be Nonnegotiable
Over the years, we’ve seen businesses lagging in the digital enablement of their business capabilities. The effects of the slow adoption of technology were not as pronounced as they are today. Most businesses could cling onto an old way of doing things as long as their customers had limited alternative options. That has changed dramatically as the global market has opened up. Businesses have become more customer-centric as customers now have access to a plethora of options at their fingertips. It is critical that the business implements the right technology to automate the business processes in delivering the best value to customers.
Technology is now more consequential to business. In the past, when online banking was down, it wasn’t a disaster per se as most people still went to the bank physically. That has been turned upside down with most people drawn to the convenience of banking apps. A banking app being down for a weekend will cost the bank millions.
Migration to the Cloud
As more and more business transactions take place online, the migration to the cloud will be accelerated. With most organizations adopting a hybrid work-from-home/work-from-the-office approach as a norm, EA will have to evolve into a cloud-first discipline in order to be impactful.
Greater Cybersecurity Risks
In line with the expanded scope of EA, EA will become more considerate of cybersecurity risks in the development of architecture. It will no longer be about just optimizing IT capabilities but also about how to secure them. EA will create, examine, or determine the suitability of existing company cybersecurity policies, ensuring that recognized standards and best practices are implemented. Techniques such as zero-trust and threat hunting will be frequently used in addressing the possible security measures to be taken with increased working from home and outsourcing of services.
Reusability
Reusability is the ability to use an existing technological asset in the development of a new product or capability. More and more businesses are striving to develop as many reusable assets as possible to avoid the costs of building new products from scratch and to tackle any issues of technical debt. This approach fits in with the future-facing approach of EA as today’s assets will be developed with future assets in mind. Solutions will not only serve the business in the present but the business will be able to integrate them in the long term. Reusability also delivers a level of consistency between components within the same architecture. This consistency may also reflect externally through delivering a consistent customer experience, for example, through having a consistent user interface over time.
Development Cycles Will Become Shorter and Shorter
DevOps is a mixture of cultural approaches, practices, and tools that increase a business's ability to deliver applications and services quickly.
DevOps is a cultural shift in the way enterprises operate. A consequence of adopting DevOps may mean having a central platform to develop, deploy, and test new functionalities within the context of best practices. DevOps is quickly becoming a norm as businesses compete to deliver value to customers at a faster rate. DevOps has become the key to creating and managing a consistent technology stack that is pivotal for supporting different development teams. As EA has traditionally been a long-term endeavor, it will have to adapt to this through agile EA. Agile EA embraces the principles and values of agile software development in its own right, and DevOps is complementary with agile software development. Instead of having one big bang approach to EA and digital transformation, continuous transformation will be the order of the day with a periodic updating of the desired future states of the business.
Enterprise Intelligence
Information architecture will be the main focus as businesses try to learn more and more about themselves and their customers. Predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science will play a critical role in educating your business. Data from predictive analysis may be leveraged in designing future state scenarios. Modelling of varying data sources will be important for EA to enable information-driven business models. It is important that this data is reliable because it will act as a fuel to any technological tool; the principle of “garbage in, garbage out” will still hold.
For instance, although SAP Enterprise Designer offers the functionality to draw your models from scratch, it’s much more efficient to generate the model from data pulled automatically from the data sources within the enterprise.
The Future Enterprise Architect
Enterprise Architects are unique in the sense that they operate across the business in order to optimize how it runs within the context of its strategic goals. They require a high degree of innovative and creative thinking to assess business requirements, recommend technology, and model an architecture that enables applications, information sources, and technical infrastructure to achieve business objectives. This book is intended to be a practical guide to practicing Enterprise Architecture. Thus far, a lot of information has been put forward. Ultimately, what do all of these challenges and predictions of the future mean for the Enterprise Architect?
The Enterprise Architect
Those who will collaborate with the Enterprise Architect
Those who will hire the Enterprise Architect
The role of the Enterprise Architect will go beyond modelling and IT standards but will see them become a vehicle for agility and innovation. This may seem daunting or overwhelming initially, but the Enterprise Architect now has more opportunities to contribute to the success of the business.
Deliver business value
Have broad knowledge that covers all the domains
Have researching skills
Have an understanding of cloud strategies
Utilize customer journey mapping
Emphasize data-driven EA
Have a knowledge of Enterprise Architecture methodologies
Have an understanding of cybersecurity
Deliver Business Value
The word “architecture” gives the idea of producing copious amounts of documentation and models. In Chapter 8, we highlighted difficulties such as analysis paralysis that an Enterprise Architect can face as a result of doing too much planning and analysis. This is one of the areas agile EA intends to address. Enterprise Architects should focus on delivering business value by executing the first implementable unit of their plan no matter how small. It is these short sprints coupled with continuous feedback that will demonstrate the value of EA to stakeholders. Focus on business value and business outcomes by having a clear answer for “why” EA is being implemented by your business.
Broad Knowledge
As has been alluded to throughout this chapter, an Enterprise Architect will need a solid understanding of business and technology landscapes. The Enterprise Architect should be capable of acting in an advisory capacity for both domains. This uniquely positions them to have an enterprise-wide understanding of the potential impact of any strategic decisions, emerging business capabilities, or new technology. Normally, a technical business analyst would play the role of bridging business and IT but only within the context of a specific product or business capability. An Enterprise Architect bridges this gap for the entire business.
Researching
Innovation mainly comes from being well informed about the latest technology breakthroughs and applying creative thinking to develop a value-generating way to implement them within your business. Research drives the research and development (R&D) activities that a business carries out to innovate and introduce new products and services. Robust researching practices ensure that a business is well informed about its environment and its customers. This ultimately leads to a competitive advantage through the business being able to continuously adapt to its environment and customer demands.
An Enterprise Architect must have strong researching skills and must do so proactively rather than reactively in order to stay ahead of the curve. The desired future state of your business must never become fixed but must rather be continually updated in accordance with the latest relevant technological advancements. New technology trends are not to be implemented for the sake of it, but rather they must always be a means to an end such as the creation of new revenue streams. This implies that the research should go beyond technology trends but also include cutting-edge business ideas.
Cloud Strategies
Cloud computing and online transactions are here to stay, at least for now. Understanding cloud strategies, cloud migration strategies in particular, will be critical to an Enterprise Architect’s skillset. For example, an Enterprise Architect should be able to advise whether the business should use a rehosting or refactoring strategy in their cloud migration. The former involves simply migrating the applications to the cloud as they are, whereas the latter involves adapting them to leverage cloud-specific features such as container-based environments.
Customer Journey Mapping
Previously, the business had to know the customer, and the Enterprise Architect had to know the business. Today, the Enterprise Architect must have an intimate knowledge of the customer journey and how it maps to business capabilities. This allows the Enterprise Architect to zero in on the IT capabilities and infrastructure that support the most revenue-generating business capabilities in the context of the customer journey. This allows for the optimization and improvement of the customer experience.
Enterprise Architecture Methodologies
It has been emphasized throughout this book that Enterprise Architecture methodologies should never be seen as a one-size-fits-all approach to Enterprise Architecture. However, Enterprise Architects should have enough knowledge of different Enterprise Architecture methodologies to use them as a starting point and customize them to suit their specific context. This customization should particularly focus on making the methodology adaptable to change.
Data-Driven EA
There are not many tangible and certifiable skills that an Enterprise Architect can possess beyond certification for an EA methodology such as TOGAF. However, with businesses becoming increasingly dependent on their data, a data science certification and a demonstrable competence in architecting information structures is of tremendous value. Today’s businesses are formally and informally driven by data. Strategic decision making, operational decision making, and Enterprise Architecture itself require reliable data to produce results. Enterprise Architects should have the skills required to isolate relevant data and leverage it contextually.
Cybersecurity
The Enterprise Architect of the future must possess a working knowledge of cybersecurity concepts such as zero-trust. With a sizeable portion of modern architecture encompassing online platforms, cybersecurity will no longer be an afterthought or an exercise only undertaken after an incident has occurred. The Enterprise Architect must know all of the proactive cybersecurity measures that must be taken to protect the enterprise.
The Final Boss – Closing Thoughts on Stakeholder Management
As the saying goes, “the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.” Even with all of the changes, challenges, and Enterprise Architecture skills we have explored throughout this chapter, the most critical aspect of EA remains stakeholder management.
The increased complexity that businesses are facing means there will be increased uncertainty that is more often than not going to trigger anxiety among stakeholders. EA must ramp up its change management processes to ensure stakeholder buy-in. This was always a difficult activity, but this difficulty increases exponentially in the face of globalization and serving a global market. Successfully managing cost-cultural diversity becomes a key aspect of securing the support of stakeholders and delivering a successful EA program. The EA team should take every opportunity to engage with them about the required change through a “Let’s try this, what do you think?” type of approach.
EA must not only seek to inform stakeholders but to inspire and motivate them toward change. This can be achieved through how the Enterprise Architect reacts to a need for change, even if they’re not initially aware of how they will bring about that change. An EA should never be quick to say no but rather details the risks of any idea and the possible measures to mitigate it. This empowers stakeholders and helps them understand if it makes sense to proceed or not. Stakeholders must understand what EA does and how it positively impacts the work they do. Actively collaborating with stakeholders is nonnegotiable.
The Enterprise Architect must not collect data in a silo but must collaborate with the relevant stakeholders in their data collection efforts. This ensures that they can see things through the lens of the stakeholders and assess that from their own enterprise-wide view. There are many nuances that do not appear in a report or spreadsheet that you can gain when you engage stakeholders in their natural environment. Try to figure out how to collaborate and engage stakeholders in a way that suits them rather than yourself. Be careful to not overload stakeholders with information, but take your time to determine a pace that is comfortable for the stakeholders without compromising EA timelines.
The enterprise architect should always lead with business value. Stakeholders want to see results. One way of accomplishing this is by not reinventing the wheel. For instance, reimagine how the business leverages existing data and technological assets rather than starting afresh. Tap into the business’s unexplored potential; look into the business first before exploring external solutions. The business may already have what it takes to transform the business in accordance with their business strategy.
Soft skills are of paramount importance in stakeholder engagement. Being present, showing empathy, consciously listening to stakeholders, and emotional intelligence, to mention a few, are some of the soft skills that will enable an Enterprise Architect to win over stakeholders. The modern EA will have to engage with board members and executive teams about the business implications of technology decisions. This process is significantly smoother through being relatable and likeable.
The Enterprise Architect must be able to use digestible business language to explain the potential impact of technological decisions. For instance, with globalization, using mergers and acquisitions is a viable strategy for increasing your global footprint through existing and established entities. The Enterprise Architect will be expected to explain how the existing systems of these entities are to be integrated or replaced in the context of business impact.
This can only be carried out effectively through practical business language and not the underlying technical jargon. At this level, Enterprise Architects can really influence change and investment decisions by articulating their business impact.
Lastly, the enterprise architect must be as proactive as possible and anticipate any questions before they’re asked so that you can be prepared with the relevant answers. EA’s currency within an organization is being able to provide actionable insights that stem from their multiperspective, enterprise-wide view of the business.
Summary
Enterprise Architecture enables you to understand the relationship between business outcomes, business strategy, and technology, which in turn empowers you to identify areas for improvement and sheds light on the changes required to optimize your enterprise. Enterprise architecture is future proof because it is a single source of truth, and your business will always need a single source of truth. Historically, this only referred to the IT standards, governance policies, and models found in the EA repository, but today it also refers to the data generated through intelligent architectures. EA can now facilitate strategy execution and also inform future strategy development.
Customer expectations will continue to drive innovation as they have been; Enterprise Architecture will provide the structure to the decision making and change implementation required to meet customer demands. This also means that the role of EA is now relevant to both the business and its customers. EA must produce end-to-end models that can generate valuable insights to drive digital transformation for both the business and its customers.
There are new challenges that EA must face mainly due to the increasing complexity introduced by businesses aiming to serve global markets. This often means the use of cutting-edge technology that the world is still trying to figure out; best practices for implementing that technology may not even exist yet. The modern Enterprise Architect must either upgrade an existing skillset or develop a new skillset entirely to lead the charge against these new challenges. Aspects such as cybersecurity and cloud migration strategies will be a focal point in establishing the enterprises of the future.
Lastly, the most critical element of Enterprise Architecture remains stakeholder management. You could have the greatest EA program, but it means nothing without stakeholder buy-in. EA will have to develop and implement approaches to stakeholder management that take account of culturally diverse and decentralized stakeholder groups.