Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

Business architecture is valuable to all organizations, regardless of type or size. This Executive Update discusses how nonprofits and small organizations can leverage business architecture and articulates some considerations for architecting within these types of environments.

Many organizations embark upon the “Agile transformational journey” only to find that what looked simple in the planning process is far more complex in reality. The complexity is in the degree and magnitude of the change and the fact that there is no single prescribed solution that works for all situations. Despite what many traditional consultancies advertise, there is no set pattern to success for senior executives to follow. As the DNA of each organization is unique, the reasons for market success and the strategic vision are distinctive, so the means to alter these formulae must be unique as well.

Many organizations are now focusing on a hybrid cloud strategy: moving part of their IT capabilities to the cloud, while maintaining core elements in-house, hosted on-premises. The hybrid model enables organizations to optimally allocate their resources while keeping their current IT infrastructure operating at low risk. A hybrid cloud strategy not only prepares an organization for the future but also protects its investment today. In this Advisor, we describe hybrid cloud and look at its benefits, including security and compliance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.

There’s a balance to strike in architecture, no matter what methodology you use to create your software. In Agile contexts, that balance is often lost. And it usually leans to less over more. I think the most important acknowledgement or statement that we should all agree to early on in any architectural discussion is that we don’t know. Out of this level of openness and honesty comes the need for prototyping, discovery, and learning. It’s hard to do that if we don’t look each other in the eyes and say, “We don’t know, let’s find out.”

The main value of being increasingly agile is to allow the organization to realize its potential visions more quickly, with less investment, and with greater chances of success. To realize those visions, one must have abilities — both non-digital and digital. Digital abilities are information systems–enabling abil­ities that allow for agility. In this Advisor, we define digital abilities through a partial list of key abilities in the form of technologies, attitudes, and approaches we should adopt to become agile.

Despite general agreement among researchers and academics of the need for board-level involvement in IT governance, it appears that in practice this is more the exception than the rule. Given the prevalence of this issue, we have sought to answer the question, “What is the state of the art of the research domain of board-level IT governance?” In this Advisor, we share a few of our findings on the various determinants, theories, and outcomes surrounding board-level IT governance.

An architecture is often thought of as one uniform thing that underlies an enterprise. However, if an enterprise itself is not uniform, is it reasonable to think of its underpinnings as being consistent everywhere? Would we not expect an ideal architecture to mold itself around the curves and ragged edges of the real outlines of the enterprise, guiding it, and being guided by it? This Advisor suggests a three-dimensional framework intended to help in grasping the critical spatial dimensions of enterprises, and to assist in seeing the lines and jagged edges of a specific enterprise, along those dimensions. Architecture needs a ground to stand on – that ground is the enterprise architecture. It behooves architects to grasp what lies beneath their feet.

In this Executive Update, we explore why organizations need data democratization and how they can achieve it.