A Fresh Approach to Modern Enterprise Architecture
Recently, we were told it was okay to use specialist architectural jargon with business stakeholders and customers “because the terms are defined in an industry-standard, and you just need to repeat the terms often enough for people to eventually understand what you mean”. Such thinking belongs in a time well past, along with diatribes about the distinction between business capabilities vs business functions and is responsible for people considering Enterprise Architecture (EA) ‘ivory tower’ and irrelevant.
So, what does Modern Enterprise Architecture look like?
What is apparent across the many clients we work with is that modern EA is a merging of design and technology-related disciplines.
The modern Enterprise Architect needs to interact competently with designers of various types, agile development teams, and increasingly an executive interested in adopting ‘tech start-up’ culture and behaviour in a business environment of ever-increasing cycles of change and disruption. As the world emerges from the COVID-19 lockdown there will be demand for individuals that understand the recovering business eco-system and are able to provide timely, insightful advice on where and when to invest in the business, the role of technology, and the roadmap back to viability.
In this article, we set out the defining characteristics of successful enterprise architects drawn from our collective experience at FromHereOn and thousands of hours of delivering enterprise architecture services, co-designing EA practices, and delivering training across almost every industry sector, for large and small enterprises worldwide. I’ll also sketch out where we think the discipline is headed and why.
Our approach to EA Practice co-design is to first ask – what role does the rest of the business want EA to play? Increasingly, the answer is a set of services that provide rapid advice and guidance up and down the stack, eco-system-wide planning, and enablement of agile execution. The delivery of these services requires a significant change to the operating model for most Practices we encounter.
But first, let’s look at what we’re seeing less of…
The Demise of Traditional EA
THE SPECIALIST DOMAIN EXPERT
While labels such as business architect, information architect and/or technology architect are still relevant and useful, it is not uncommon to encounter individuals who are conversant across many of these areas. With the possible exception of information security, the days of strict architecture domains with dedicated roles and specialisms seem to be in decline.
Arguably, the complexity of modern business problems requires an individual skill set that delivers an architecture that spans from customer need, to operational requirement to technology platform and components.
BIG DESIGN UP FRONT AND CONTROL
Inherent in many EA frameworks (e.g., TOGAF) is the following logic: design or architect a future landscape or solution, understand the gaps between the current state and the required outcome and then formalise these gaps as discrete projects to execute to realise the future state. This thinking does not sit well with contemporary agile ways of working with its philosophy of the empowerment of emergent design at its core. This is not to say that there is not a place for EA alongside agile delivery models as we will see, or even to suggest that there is not a need to ‘paint the big picture’ - it is to suggest that there is a fundamental shift in required mindset and approach.
TECHNOLOGY COMPONENT CENTRICITY
The architecting of technology components and the interactions between them will always be important. However, the increased commoditisation of technology and the maturity and completeness of cloud-based ‘as a service’ offerings means that there has been a shift away from the need to describe in detail the technology components within a platform and toward an expression of the way in which the platform as a whole is likely to be used (i.e., the business perspective).
STATIC DIAGRAMS
Historically, EA has been delivered via the production of formalised ‘artefacts’, i.e. various ‘models’ or ‘visualisations’ of a problem space or domain of interest depicted using a standard set of objects and relationships.
In the more mature EA practices these models are constructed from a common underlying meta-model, and are managed using a repository tool, allowing them to be frequently refreshed and updated. While the use of a meta-model to describe businesses (i.e. using a common language) is arguably one of traditional EA’s most valuable contributions to modern practice, the rate of change within contemporary businesses, requires an approach that is highly dynamic, accurate, engaging and insightful.
The use of two dimensional ‘visual models’ is increasingly inadequate to capture the organic, highly networked, and rapidly changing modern business eco-system.
The Rise of Modern EA
THE UBIQUITOUS ARCHITECT
Modern Enterprise Architects have experience spanning the domains of technology, data and business architecture. Furthermore, these individuals typically also have significant experience in related disciplines such as systems thinking, design thinking, service design or graphic design.
The core skill set here is not that of the “authoritative expert”, but rather that of “complex problem solver”. Individuals who have the ability to dive confidently into unfamiliar complexity, work collaboratively to make sense of it and understand its implications. This ability comes with experience at solving previous complex problems, and the development over time of a ‘tool kit’ of techniques (e.g., customer research, ideation, abstraction, prototyping), tools (e.g., mind maps, visualisations, reference models), and behaviours (e.g., collaboration, iteration) that assist with managing complexity.
Another characteristic of modern EA practice is its opaqueness. By that, we mean that the delivery process is not overtly “enterprise architecture”, with all the discipline-specific jargon and terminology, but rather something outwardly indistinguishable from business management consulting, or business or service design.
ENABLEMENT OF CREATIVE OR EMERGENT DESIGN
Agile development and more broadly Agile Ways of Working have transformed many aspects of how organisations manage change and deliver outcomes. A core reason for adopting an agile or scrum-based approach to delivery is to promote emergent design*. The modern enterprise architect is comfortable balancing both emergent design and longer-term intentionality, rather than adopting a ‘control and governance’ mindset that is about constraining or ‘de-risking’ creative design processes. Instead, the challenge for modern EA’s is to learn how to turn 180 degrees and anticipate the direction and requirements of agile delivery squads, providing just enough relevant guidance, just in time.
The concept of minimal viable product is pertinent to EA delivery within an agile context. Adopting an iterative test and learn approach to the production of EA outputs is an invitation to enterprise architects to prototype, to grow and extend an EA to enable and support multiple concurrent emergent design value streams.
CUSTOMER & SERVICE CENTRICITY
With the rise of the online consumer, has come an increasing focus on services and customer experience for most businesses. Consequently, modern EA needs to include Customer Journey Maps and Service Blueprints as standard items in the tool kit and use engaging and compelling ways to represent or architect value creation and value propositions.
Service-led business transformation is increasingly common in a business environment where disruption is the norm. The modern enterprise architect has a key role to play in describing alignment between business ambition, customer need, services, and the operating model and technology needed to deliver them. The enterprise architect also has a key role to play in informing business investment decisions to improve this alignment, or when to pivot and invest in something new.
SOFT SKILLS ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT
The modern enterprise architect is recognised for their communication skills, engaging with a range of audiences and facilitates great design outcomes. The modern enterprise architect is not to be found sitting in the IT department producing Visio diagrams.
Modern EA, unlike its traditional predecessor which had its roots in technology, is a human-centric discipline, which places people and their ambition at the centre of each problem it solves. The modern EA understands that a business is a loose coalition of individuals which organise around the exchange of value, and that technology is always only a tool that enables these exchanges.
The modern EA also understands the importance of customer experience, particularly the experience of customers of EA itself, and therefore will put aside time to design engaging workshop and showcase experiences that lead participants to valuable moments of insight about their business.
MODERN ‘ARTEFACTS’
There is a trend away from the use of static diagrams and toward visual digitally interactive models and technologies such as digital twin. Next-generation digital twin tools include AI capabilities to interrogate, scenario test, predict and report on dynamic enterprise content.
The other trend we’re observing in this space is the rise of the Graphic Designer as a core member of the EA team. This reflects EA’s movement towards the mainstream as it steps away from its historic roots of being embedded in the IT department and using IT department tools, formalised ‘models’ giving way to engaging info-graphics on particular business topics. When done well, these appeal to a wide business audience while retaining the EA engineering rigor and adherence to a common underlying meta-model.
Where EA is Heading and Why
Enterprise Architecture as a discipline has withstood the test of time. We believe this is because it serves the fundamental need to be able to demonstrate traceability from an initial idea through to its final implementation. This is the need to be sure that what we have delivered is what was envisaged. For this reason, we believe there will always be a need for the role that EA plays. There will always be a need to imagine, plan and test in the abstract, and demonstrate traceability from concept to realisation.
However, in the near future, any job that can be codified can expect to be subsumed within an AI-enabled solution of some description. An optimistic view is that this will leave people to concentrate on doing the things human’s do well e.g. imagine novel possibilities and unique solutions and set about creating them; to undertake open-ended, exploratory and creative design processes. As I’ve begun to sketch in this article, the delivery of modern EA requires new skills and a fundamentally different EA Practice operating model.
In this context, the value of the modern enterprise architect will be the ability to bring groups of designers and agile builders together around a given ambition and endeavour, to promote collaboration via a common design language, to align and coordinate effort across squads and to provide the ecosystem to support the realisation of daring, creative and valuable ideas.
Enterprise modelling in future we suspect is likely to have more in common with chaos theory and its focus on initial conditions and steady states, rather than static, deterministic enterprise plans and roadmaps.