Evolving Role Of Enterprise Architecture
As IT's role has evolved in the organization, the enterprise architecture function should also evolve from a strategy ivory tower focused on policies and procedures to a more practical and collaborative organization that drives digital blueprints. This multi-part series will discuss some practical learnings in creating, maturing, and growing enterprise architecture functions.
Part I — Evolving Role of Enterprise Architecture
Part II — Demonstrating Value of Enterprise Architecture
Part III — Driving Digital Transformation using EA
Part I — Evolving Role of Enterprise Architecture
Traditionally, the enterprise architecture(EA) function has been the torchbearer of organization technology policies and procedures. EAs have approved new technologies, created standards and guidelines for its adoption. They have also acted as a gatekeeper to ensure technologies policies and procedures were enforced. It worked perfectly for organizations to grow and mature their IT, where EA focused on standards and governance while the development team focused on the delivery of applications.
Changing role of IT and Architecture
We have been doing digital for the last 30+ years. IT digitized existing processes making them faster, better, and cheaper. These initiatives had a relatively well-defined target state — the current manual processes to a more technology-enabled automated state. With the help of a matured EA function, IT did a stupendous job in delivering the digitization. In digitization, the changes were packed as “Projects” with a defined To-Be state. IT executed “Projects” and deployed them.
Digital Transformation is not about making things digital but using digital technologies to create a new business model. This means your target state is not constant but constantly evolving. So, in this case, IT has to change how it operated fundamentally.
In the digitizing world, structured processes, standardization, harmonization, and governance provided economies of scale. In the digital transformation, when the change is constant, it is about moving fast, learning fast, and failing fast. In this process, innovation and economies of speed would deliver the benefits. This led to everyone gravitating towards lean startup, design thinking, fail fast and agile mindset. Looking at enterprise IT as a Product is a new order of the day.
Where does that leave the enterprise architecture?
The traditional EA role has come under scrutiny. When the time to market is critical, the architecture review boards and their approvals are considered a speed breaker. Moreover, with the agile model, in which the agile teams are empowered to make decisions, the EA team's role in driving governance is questioned. Since there is no quote-unquote “Enterprise Architecture” in the Product Management books, the EA function can be perceived as an overhead.
But is this really true? Can mid-size to large technology-dependent businesses achieve their business or IT goals without having a mature EA function?
The Pitfalls
Many organizations have mistakenly fallen into the above trap and do away with the enterprise architecture function or made it limited, creating a vacuum in the organization that brings in strategic consistency across many team’s technology directions and fostering collaboration. As a result, the organizations have led to several redundant or point solutions and siloed systems that may solve tactical problems but an overall stack up technical debt, bringing down the ROI or impeding business agility that the organization wanted to achieve.
To meet the changing expectation, the EA roles should also evolve to more innovation and business outcome-focused and encourage more iterative architecture.
Evolving Roles of an Enterprise Architect
EA has continued to evolve ever since Zachman introduced a framework in the 1980s. Initial days the EA was frameworks-driven, subsequently on processes-driven as articulated by The Open Group, and now subsequently, it has transitioned into business-outcome-driven.
In the evolving IT enterprise, Enterprise Architect roles should evolve to wear three major hats.
- EA as a strategic business partner: In the modern enterprise, by focusing on business value, EAs can make organizations think of technology as a business. EAs should be bringing an overarching view to the organization focused on different silos and helping business leaders connect the dots. They should be engaging with the business partners on refining business needs, and improving business capabilities using technology, thus stimulating strategic thought processes. It should focus on proactively improving IT that would support the business efficiently.
- EA as an active product team member: As part of the agile transformation, most organizations are moving towards a product-centric approach, in which all product teams are independent. Inherently, a product team is a matrix organization. In that sense, EA should be made an integral part of the product team. . They would work on epics or stories that would provide architecture runways for the teams and provide governance by being part of the team than an outside function.
- EA as a technology evangelist: Organizations with successful transformations deploy more technologies than others do, according to a McKinsey survey. EAs with their broad understanding of business and technology are well-positioned to spot key technology trends, access the impact of emerging technology on business, identify business use cases to demonstrate value, and help to accelerate their adoption. EAs, with a forward focus on technology trends, can prove to be a great asset to the organization.
Conclusion
Enterprise Architecture function can transform itself from a perceived cost center to a change agent that helps organizations unlock their true potential through digital transformation. It has a significant role to play in modern, fast-paced, agile, and nimble IT. By taking certain steps, the EA can be the organization's influential leaders that accelerate organization success.
In subsequent series, we would discuss some specific learning about how EA can create value and drive change.
