EA in the innovation era.

Now more than ever, organizations are embracing EA practices as they know it is the true answer to today’s business agility and technology disruptions. Large organizations are busy developing their EA capabilities in a manner that gives them an advantage over their competitors.

Digital business trends have created new business designs. Enterprises that are sticking to their traditional EA practices will not be able to cope in this era of digital transformation. The skillset required in this era is no longer IT focused. Organizations need to recruit and develop EA caliber that is business outcome focused and very responsive to technology innovation opportunities.

According to Gartner, world-class EA practices that can stand-up to this challenges have a wide range of stakeholders involved in the EA program. Their teams usually have a deep understanding of the strategy and are equipped with a variety of advanced team resources that enable problem solving skills.  In addition, these organizations have well-structured enterprise architecture governance that defines how the EA program is maintained and how it relates to other enterprise-wide process such as capital planning. Moreover, they do a have solid EA measurement program that is well integrated within the architectural process.

Yet, this world class EA practices needs to improve its ability to identify and understand the business economic and financial factors that is impacted by innovation. The fact that innovations are not tested technologies, requires that these organizations conduct emerging technology evaluation and determine the opportunities that can be sought to achieve certain business outcomes.

This means that the future will call for super enterprise architects who do not use the traditional ways of EA to support decision making. These super Enterprise architects will not emerge out of nowhere. In fact EA institutions needs to start preparing and developing them.

Good and Bad practices of transitioning to the future State

Lately, I was among a group of enterprise architects and IT professionals who shared their experiences and thoughts on how their organizations transition from a current state to a desired future state, in particular we discussed the use of road-maps to help the enterprise visualize the transition. Although I have blogged twice about EA road-maps, I decided to share this interesting discussion and my thoughts out of it.

It surprised me that many of them felt that the road-maps developed in their organizations are “too dense with technical information”. Loads of technical details are included such as Application Middle-ware Services, Data Services, Network Services, Network-based Services, Platform Services, Development Services, and Security Services making them rather look as technical deployment plans. Identified initiatives are not presented in a way that shows how they are related to strategy and dependent on each other. In other words, it is very difficult to get the information you need out of them. I can see that these organization had fallen into one of the worst EA practices identified by Gartner which is: confusing technology architecture with enterprise architecture.

Some professionals mentioned that their organizations do not use road-maps to guide change efforts. In these organizations, changes are identified in a reactive manner. Changes are either triggered by stakeholders or internal and external events through emails, process workflows and town hall meetings.  Well, I am confident that these organizations suffer from poor coordination and a lack of a common ground on how the enterprise should move towards its future directions. Therefore, It can be said that they do not really have an EA program in place.

Many professional stated that their organizations use graphical high level road-maps to illustrate the sequence of capabilities that need to be obtained to reach the desired future state.  Their road-maps are updated on a periodic basis to reflect the timelines and scope of initiatives that will affect the organization. According to them, these road-maps were excellent communication tools that brought the attention of even the non-executive staff.

One of the enterprise architects explained how their business outcome based enterprise architecture practice leveraged the use of road-maps to communicate their transition to the target architecture in the most effective way, by listing the outcomes and the initiatives along with disruptors and risks. This has allowed them to show what would be delivered and how these outcomes would address the disruptors and risks. I believe that this approach has allowed stakeholders outside of the enterprise architecture team to easily understand the goals of the enterprise architecture program.

There is no doubt that a simple, clear graphical EA road-maps can allow the organization to coordinate and communicate change efforts, as long as this road-map is kept current.

See you in week 15 !