Enterprise Architecture – Adapt to survive or its all just a history lesson!
This week I was lookin through Forrester and stumbled upon some interesting articles relating to trends with project management (agile), the shift to cloud and digital, convergence of IT and. Th and what this means for Enterprise Architecture. This is highly relevant to the company regarding my employ as an enterprise architect in the midst of these disruptive paradigm shifts.
Alex Cullen of Forrester said as one of the predictions for EA in 2016 is Fit for purpose and “traditional purpose and model of EA will no longer be relevant” [3]. Obviously this is an alarming statement especially for all of us spending the time and money to study this field. This poses some challenges for EA in how do we rethink the practice and how do we continue to keep EA relevant? On the flip side, this is an exciting time to be able to redesign what EA means to organizations embracing these trends. Generally speaking the old adage “carrot and the stick”, a common saying regarding EA governance has much become a carrot only. EA is loosing it’s teeth in these enterprises and terms like VoC (Voice of the Customer) and value add are coming more in vouge again. Meaning, if they don’t add value for the customer, then they are irrelevant.
Taking the traditional models like TOGAF, whereas the Business, Technology, Data, Governance, Applied, etc… are all in need of revamp. What I can foresee if that the business architecture will become more relevant as IT embeds themselves with the business. However traditional ivory tower thinking will no longer be acceptable in this new landscape. Business architects still need to do the academic work, however they need a way to anchor to what is relevant for the business. The operational nature of the business would assert that business architecture could embrace business process and use that to anchor itself tying together the academic/strategic components with processes helping to mature the relationship between architects and operational business folks alike.
As for the other roles within EA, I think there will be more of a challenge. These towers like data and technology generally produce work for the enterprise et al. They often don’t take things like (CX) customer experience into account. Usually, they look at solutions from a technical perspective, embracing new technologies. For example, data architects are looking at things like Hadoop for boiling the ocean of data, technology architecture embracing microservices and applied architecture running up against ways to align development with CICD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) patterns to existing technologies. While these are all trends in the market, their relevance to a Customer Value Stream is negledgable at this point. I would ask, where’s the “so what”? These areas while currently nessesary will continue to deteriorate into strictly an R&D function and once labeled, will face even deeper scrutiny based on ROI and operational bottom line costs.
[1] Connie Moore, Forrester, 2012-04 The Process Driven Busienss of 2020
[2] Craig Le Clair and Henery Peyret, Forrester, 2015-09, Cloud Platforms will Turn Enterprise Architecture Inside Out
[3] Alex Cullen, Forrester, 2015-11, Predictions 2016: EA Reshapes to be For for Purpose
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Fantastic! I'm so glad to read this. This is why I think EA needs to get out from under the CIO side of business and align itself to finance (https://eaisnotez.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/part-1-why-ea-should-report-to-cfo/). I have found it easier to justify EA when I've worked in program management offices than when I've been doing deep-layer functional modeling to support operations or for IT reasons (usually ending up as current-state activities, similar to inventory). When in a finance shop, the information has usually been used to inform on the tough decisions, like systems to decommission and budgeting, and improvements, like opportunities to centralize data. Add value or die.
Hi Michael,
I completely agree with you on EA roles getting to be more challenging. With the advent of more "shiny objects" at this point of time with regards to Data, Applications and technology, the question is at what pace an organization needs to go behind acquiring or implementing these shiny objects. Will these shiny objects put an organization on a "leading edge" or will also put it on the "bleeding edge"? We have had similar heart-aches with certain SaaS offerings for ERP pillars like HCM and with Big Data initiatives. After these experiences, we realized that our organization was not yet mature enough for these new shiny objects and we have to now endure the pain of implementing these solutions. Turning a R&D science project to reality requires time and effort which both attribute to extra costs. EA being in the midst of these changes is a challenging job.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Veena.