Significance of Enterprise Architecture

As part of the race towards digital transformation, companies are accelerating their digital investments and launching more digital capabilities. Business leaders outside IT are driving these initiatives, gradually acquiring their own digital resources and talent to deliver and operate these capabilities, and increasingly making technology decisions along the way. 

The problem is that each of these initiatives are addressed in isolation. Overlapping technology capabilities are purchased, duplicate solutions developed or conflict with other initiatives, stovepipe approaches to integration, and data / analytics are taken.  Technical debt increases and fewer services are reused.  Over time complexity increases and agility reduces, to the point that it impedes the transformation programs & undermines desired business outcomes.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) plays a critical role in reducing complexity and risks, maximizing reuse, reducing speed to market, and driving digital innovations at scale,by setting the course for the development of their company’s landscape and facilitating greater coordination between digital investment decisions across the enterprise.  It accomplishes that through the following key practices:

• Defining and maintaining capability reference architectures or north stars for business applications and digital platforms/enabling technologies and socializing across the enterprise. This provides a common language across the enterprise, clarifies technology standards and direction for various capabilities, helps increase awareness and reduce duplications and inconsistent application of technologies

• Proactively connecting and engaging with business stakeholders across regions and functions to gain visibility of and evaluate the demand for digital investments early on, identify and resolve hot spotssuch as interconnections and conflicts with other initiatives, duplicative technologies, and maximize alignment with standards

• Standing architecture review boards with representatives across functions to make decisions on exceptions to standards and new technologies, helping minimize duplications

• Defining solution architecture (at conceptual, logical, and physical levels) for strategicdigital initiatives using architecture best practices, ensuring solutions can rapidly scale across markets, are flexible, resilient,secure,work right the first time and have long term viability (future proof)

• Driving technology evaluations and strategy for new digital capabilities, with a focus on criteria that ensures technology is scalable as well as enables the business process at a cost that supports a compelling business case. The evaluation is a comprehensive assessment covering functional and non-functional requirements that results in an objective,fact-based recommendation enabling optimal technology decisions.

• Driving legacy application portfolio rationalization, to simplify legacy landscape and systems that digital products must integrate with, helping drive more agility in the delivery of digital solutions

To successfully capitalize on EA value proposition&facilitate digital transformation, companiesneed to embrace its strategic role, embed it across the organization and elevate its skills:

- Senior management to empower the EA team by encouraging the implementation of their policies and practices

- Have a well-connected EA with strong partnerships across the entire organization for a full cross enterprise perspective

- Nurture EA soft skills, especially on communication, conceptual selling,business, and management acumen. Investing in developing this critical capability enables the translation of complex architecture issues or grey areas into terms and simple frameworksthat business partners can understand, and articulate pros and cons of architecture decisions and how they contribute to business outcomes. This will promote closer alignment and bridge gaps in perspectives between various stakeholders across business and IT.

With these tactics, EA teams can build better relationships with business stakeholders, and thereby position themselves as strategic partners in their company’s digital transformationenabling them toproactively influence the technology and architectural direction of digital initiatives to reduce complexity and risks, maximize reuse and drive digital innovation at scale.