It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

— Charles Darwin

Successful enterprise architects and architecture strive to align key stakeholders around a set of differentiated, optimized, and innovative business capabilities through seamless integration of people, data, process, and technology to enable businesses to achieve their vision and goals. It is an ongoing process, driven by digital business and IT strategies focused on achieving expected business value. EA provides a long-term view of an organization’s vision, strategic direction, capabilities, supporting operations, and IT portfolio so that individual projects can work toward building these capabilities instead of just fulfilling immediate needs in silos. Based on the age, nature, and maturity of your business, you may have a mixed bag of digital and legacy capabilities, or you may be just starting out (or venturing into a brand new business area) without any legacy to transform.

Irrespective of your current capabilities and portfolio size, EA is valuable for moving quickly into new and adjacent markets, pivoting rapidly to seize new opportunities for revenue generation, and bringing new business models up to speed before your competitors can react. Efficient EA should provide a comprehensive understanding of current and desired capabilities, services, solutions, systems, information, applications, and all other components of your IT portfolio, aligned with the constantly evolving needs of the business. When the business needs change, your EA should enable you to adapt and respond in short order.

Guiding Principles

Enterprise architecture guiding principles are high-level fundamental tenets that direct business and technology leaders and enterprise architects in the decision-making process. Even though such principles will be specific to each organization based on its needs, the following should be applicable to most:

• EA is a business-driven process. A technology-first approach that doesn’t align to digital business and IT transformation efforts will fail to deliver the anticipated return.

• EA must link strategy, business, people, process, technology, and operations. It is most effective when it simultaneously supports top-down executive planning and decision making across the enterprise and bottom-up management planning and decision making within each line of business.

• The approach to enterprise architecture must be flexible and customizable to address business requirements and respond effectively to digital disruption, including emerging technologies and business models. It should focus on agility, innovation, business value, and efficiencies.

• EA should serve as a compass, directing an enterprise toward its intended operating model and ensuring each initiative achieves both local and enterprise-wide objectives.

• Enterprise architects should make an early decision on what framework and tool, if any, they will use and which primary EA artifacts will be developed by whom, when, and for what purposes.

• Enterprise architects should concentrate on both short- and long-term benefits, to continually demonstrate the business value of EA while retaining and growing senior leadership support.

• It is critical for enterprise architects to collaborate and work closely with other organizations as they guide the development, sharing, and integration of a single view of the business and technology landscape — in other words, the enterprise architecture.

EA Benefits

A successful EA implementation should yield a number of benefits around decision making, resource optimization, and the ability to respond quickly to disruptive trends and technologies. Even though the exact benefits achieved will be unique to each organization, the following should be applicable to most:

• Increased speed and ability to translate the organization’s strategy into the necessary initiatives and investments

• Efficient portfolio-driven strategic decision making — the ability to analyze increasingly large and complex environments, assess the impact of disruption, and develop a strategic plan to address it

• The ability to manage and maintain relevant artifacts in one repository

• An integrated digital business model, including business model, operational model, and supporting IT

• Efficient resource management — cost, facilities, infrastructure, applications, and people

• Improved usage of shared services — cloud-based solutions and elimination of silos

• Agility — improved responsiveness to business requirements and digital disruption

• Improved risk management — reduced business risk, increased disaster recovery/business continuity planning capacity

EA Objectives

An organization’s approach to developing various EA artifacts will be influenced by the selected EA frameworks and tools, if any. Regardless of the chosen framework or tool, the basic intent of enterprise architecture remains the same and focuses on the following:

• Comprehending the overall strategic direction and guiding principles so as to make strategic decisions

• Understanding the current environment, including the competition, capabilities, and IT portfolio

• Evaluating disruptive technologies, business models, and solutions

• Establishing standards and developing adoption, transformation, and retirement strategies

• Defining the desired environment and blueprints to address today’s business requirements while anticipating future ones

• Identifying gaps and the key initiatives required to fill them; understanding dependencies between initiatives and the organization’s capacity to move forward (and the limitations to that capacity)

• Developing technology roadmaps and transition plans to achieve the stated business vision

• Collaborating, communicating, and demonstrating the ongoing value of enterprise architecture in order to sustain key stakeholders’ buy-in

EA represents change, and most people resist change until they clearly see the value of it for themselves. It is vital to communicate the value of EA through tangible results, whether these are quick wins or the realization of long-term strategic goals.

Targeting EA to Digital Business and IT Transformation

Even though all of the elements described above are important aspects of traditional EA, given the pace of digital disruption and the need to move fast in response to competition, businesses may want to think carefully about which parts of EA are most important for them and how much effort they should focus on those. Each transformation initiative is unique, and so should be the transformation approach and the EA group’s focus. Consider the following examples in which various organizations used a personalized version of an overall transformation and EA approach to meet their specific requirements:

• In Company A, the leadership decided to expend a bare minimum of effort to understand their current environment (IT portfolio, operations, etc.), focusing instead on their desired environment and evaluating emerging cloud-based solutions to reduce time to deliver on required capabilities. Their strategic direction was to move out of the business of IT and concentrate on their core business capabilities, which resulted in a shift from a CAPEX to an OPEX model.

• In Company B, the leadership decided to focus on bringing in new capabilities through the optimization of their current business processes, simplifying their IT portfolio while transforming it to the selected platform. This required a heavy emphasis on business process reengineering and modeling as they sought to leverage the portfolio’s full capabilities with minimum custom code.

• In Company C, the leadership decided to leverage DoDAF as a framework. But although the framework suggested 63 types of views, the company chose to develop only 15. This allowed them to concentrate on the views that were critical for them and make optimal use of resources.

EA can be an effective tool for addressing digital and IT transformation in businesses of any size, as long as they are not rigid about their approach and do not try using a big hammer where thumb pressure will work. It is important for enterprise architects to tailor their EA approach to what is feasible in the organization. Enterprise architecture sounds like a technical discipline, but it is primarily focused on business, and management of it should be the joint responsibility of the business, operations, and technology groups.

Think of EA as a framework for enabling all the disparate parts of the enterprise to function together as one seamless engine of productivity. EA allows for the ongoing synchronized alignment of business, operations, and IT. Without this alignment, businesses are exposed to risks, and bringing new products and services to market to meet the shifting demands of their customers becomes difficult.

[For more from the authors on this topic, see “Leveraging EA for Digital Business and IT Transformation.”]