My view on Enterprise architecture
For me, the primary purpose of Enterprise architecture (EA) in the digital age, is to enable, guide and support accelerated transition towards a more digital and sustainable future, in line with an organisations strategic objectives.
Thinking ecosystems
In today's globalised and digitalised world boundaries between organisations, nations and the digital and physical becomes more and more blurred. Enterprise architecture must consider this fact and include the ecosystem in which an organisations lives and grows. Evolving from Enterprise to Ecosystem architecture is therefore a must, in order to be relevant in a more digital, boundary-less and sustainable future. To be relevant, EA has to provide augmented intelligence around not the enterprise but also the ecosystems in which it operates.
The evolution of EA - skip the control mindset and countless artefacts and forums!
It’s not unusual for EA leaders to forget the primary value of EA and, with good intentions, create unnecessary countless artefacts and forums that provide very little or none value to the organisation. In order to be valuable to the organisation EA must skip the control mindset, it must become the architecture of guidance, collaboration and inspiration. "Just enough architecture" allows people and teams to be creative, work autonomously, make smart decisions, collaborate and execute efficiently.
EA and Strategy have to be aligned and use the concepts of Design Thinking, Lean and Agile to drive innovation and change.
EA Governance should mirror overall corporate/enterprise governace and should be kept to a minimum, and EA work needs to be meassured towards business objectives.
The value that the architecture team brings to the organisation comes from helping the organisation picture its future and the journey to it, while acting an expedition leader along that journey removing obstacles, guiding, supporting collaboration and inovation, aligning and inspiring to deliver business value in the shortest possible lead time.
The primary skills for an Enterprise architect in the digital age is Leadership, Communication and Technology, in that order.
When organisations evolve into a more digital and agile future, EA teams needs to adopt and:
Work and act like intrapreneurs, enabling and supporting high value business outcomes.
On an individual level balance skills in engineering with skills in business development, leadership, communication and behavioural science.
Spend less time building complex architecture models that don’t provide business value
Use non traditional EA tools and techniques such as design thinking, customer experience mapping, business model canvas etc.
To build an EA practice for the future, you need:
Support from key stakeholders across business and IT.
Way of working and deliverables tailored to business needs and goals
An EA team leveraging and balancing core IT-skills with strong business and behavioural skills.
A culture of value creation, innovation and creativity.
What is a Target architecture?
An Enterprise target architecture fusions business and technology, giving a simple, clear and inspiring multi faceted view of the future and the road to it. The target architecture details and supports the execution of a business strategy, and it therefore has now value if there is not a strategic context for it to live and support.
Why traditional EA tools will not give enough value
Do not only rely on traditional EA tools to provide enough guidance and augmented business intelligence. Traditional EA tools are more focused on modelling than creating simple, clear and inspiring high level pictures of the organisation and its future.
Instead of relying on traditional EA modelling tools EA teams should support development of automated and Ai infused processes around e.g. asset management and business intelligence to provide augmented intelligence.
In addition to only applying traditional EA tools and approaches (such as principles, roadmaps, standards and business capabilitymodels), EA teams should also use agile approaches, user-based design, ecosystem modeling, lean techniques, persona modeling, storytelling and business model canvas.
Both communism and capitalism, unblended, might be fine in theory, but they are just theory and do not survive the first contact with our complex world, the same goes with traditional EA tools. They are just the little IT-architects wet dream.