How have Recent Advancements in Enterprise Architecture Been Impacting Businesses?

The practice of enterprise architecture has been evolving to essentially enable greater flexibility for businesses within a continuously changing world. In my experience, some of the recent advancements that have brought positive change have meant the practice becoming;

• People experience-centric as opposed to organization-centric.

• Innovation, experimentation, and opportunity focused.

• Consultancy orientated, forming ‘trusted-adviser’ relationships with key ‘business’ stakeholders.

• Leaders of effective, rapid, and purposeful change whilst placing a key emphasis on adaptability.

• Practitioners of guidance over-centralized and formal governance.

• The body through which feasible options can be provided, and ultimately better decisions can be made.

So, how have these advancements been realized in practice? As we know, there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach, and each enterprise will adapt their practices to the significant architecture issues and opportunities that need to be addressed. However, some of the key approaches that I’ve been involved in are;

• Employing enterprise experience design by combining design thinking techniques with EA.

• Facilitating the need to break the scope of large scale transformations down into actionable and prioritized outcomes that can be mapped into transition horizons - 

right now, next & needed to ultimately win and aspirations/ideas for the future, allowing the full impact on the business to be easily understood.

Excellent frameworks for working with desired outcomes are impact mapping and agenda shift.

• Evolving business architecture to support the development of desirable, feasible and viable business models, whilst also thinking about the most effective way to operate the value proposition in terms of the suppliers/partners, locations, people, information technology and management structures required to support it long term.

• Applying sense-making techniques to understand, categorize, and manage the complexity, risk, and uncertainty surrounding change.

• Employing purposeful innovation with emerging technology that leads to rapid experimentation of ideas to generate new business value propositions.

• Maturing, modularizing, and standardizing the enabling technology and IT delivery practices to allow for greater re-use and scale throughout the enterprise.

 “ Businesses that have an enterprise architecture practice that make use of approaches such as these when planning for change will have greater options to increase revenue, operational effectiveness, value for customers, and strategic agility.”

• Confidently tackling big problems such as migrating away from legacy and constraining infrastructure into a modern public cloud offering within even the most risk-averse enterprises.

• Pointing the enterprise towards integrated information and AI as the keystone to exponentially scaling the enterprise.

• Leveraging SaaS, MLaaS, and AIaaS offerings to provide cost-efficient, adaptive, and continuously improving services that benefit from a collaborative community of users.

Businesses that have an enterprise architecture practice that make use of approaches such as these when planning for change will have greater options to increase revenue, operational effectiveness, value for customers, and strategic agility whilst also reducing their delivery times, cost, and risk. Furthermore, investing in developing a mature, trusted, and empowered enterprise architecture practice allows executives to exploit new market opportunities by leveraging the dynamic, modularized, and AI-powered capabilities that the practice will enable.

Having such capabilities promotes a mindset shift for executives to redefine ‘who’ and ‘what’ will form part of their future operating model, enabling them to consider that they no longer need to think about humans underpinning the whole of their operating model and that they can move towards the goal of transforming from a linear and constrained business into one that can scale out without limitations.