Change by design. Success by design
7 Key Trends in
Enterprise Architecture
To support you in your enterprise's journey of transformational change, we've gathered insights from our experts on major trends in Enterprise Architecture. Through many years of experience and countless discussions with enterprise customers and leaders, we're able to weigh in on the potential that lies in current and upcoming developments in our industry.
The environments in which we operate are continuously evolving, and the pace of change has never been faster. Ensuring rapid change and smooth ongoing operations present major challenges for enterprises. An enterprise is a complex system of many interrelated parts, and because it’s typically organized in silos across people, technology, and data it becomes challenging. The ‘Digital Enterprise’ requires major business transformations delivered at speed to succeed. So, the ability to adapt is now becoming a core capability of the enterprise.
Enterprise Architecture is a key facilitator for business agility. As architects, we need to facilitate and guide change, and we do this through design. We connect all the moving parts across disciplines, including processes, technology, data, regulations, and ideas, to enable business leaders to see the complete multi-dimensional picture of their often very complex enterprises. We focus on the business value and business outcomes, and we bring together the 'why' and the 'what' and the 'how' of architectural design.
At Bizzdesign, our mission is to help our customers thrive through change. For this reason, we've developed this guide to arm you with the knowledge of current trends that we've identified in our industry. These trends not only focus on technology, but also on how you can make your enterprise architecture practice more effective. Armed with new insight, you'll have the opportunity to interact with your stakeholders in new ways. We provide the steps you can take as an architect to stay ahead of developments and prepare for future challenges and opportunities.
Thanks for reading.
Peter Matthijssen
Chief Product Officer at Bizzdesign
Foreword
Contents
Agility in practice: modern teams focus on Change by Design
1. Create a modern Enterprise Architecture practice, check out:
Enterprise Architecture as a ‘product’: measuring strategic value
2. Innovate your Enterprise Architecture proposition, read:
3. Grow your Enterprise Architecture superpower, look into:
Secure by Design: architects bring an enterprise-wide business perspective
Artificial Intelligence-driven Enterprise Architecture: smarter and faster
Capability-driven business model innovation: adding new sources of growth
Enterprises multi-purposing big tech: Enterprise Architecture drives value on both sides
Address and improve sustainability: extend your architecture models
Enterprise Architecture supports teams to successfully execute change initiatives at speed
Trend 1: Agility in practice: modern teams focus on Change by Design
The COVID-19 pandemic is just the latest driver for organizational change and adaptivity. To adapt to the new pandemic reality, many enterprises urgently needed to change their operations in many areas. Changes may have included scaling down (or up) certain operations, enabling a digital workforce, mending broken supply chains, fixing logistical problems, or dealing with resource shortages.
As enterprise architects, we often played an essential role in this, with our broad and deep knowledge of the inner workings of enterprises and our connections to various parties in its ecosystem. In the Bizzdesign State of the Enterprise Architecture survey, statistics show a high correlation between Enterprise Architecture maturity and business agility. We see enterprise architecture leaders capable of aligning capabilities with business strategy and doing the right things at the right time to achieve positive outcomes for the business.
In the past, Enterprise Architecture was often seen as a sluggish activity mainly concerned with carefully planning large-scale changes to the IT estate of the enterprise, as well as focused on reducing cost and risk. In contrast, the agile movement focuses on speed while responding to change.
Marc Lankhorst
Managing Consultant and
Chief Technology Evangelist
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“Modern Enterprise Architecture isn’t about putting up roadblocks and checkpoints that slow down agile teams. It provides signposts and guardrails to keep teams moving in the right direction.”
Enterprise Architecture was perceived as ‘slow’ and ‘cautious’, while agile is ‘fast’ and ‘confident’. But times have changed, and Enterprise Architecture has transformed.
Changing the enterprise by design brings agility. As a result, change initiatives can now be successfully executed at speed. How is this done? Large enterprises may have hundreds of agile teams working on their solution features, unaware of the bigger picture. It is not uncommon for these teams to work in silos or conduct work that doesn’t align with the organization’s strategy. Coordination is needed, and that is what modern Enterprise Architecture offers. It isn’t about putting up roadblocks and checkpoints that slow down agile teams; rather, it provides signposts and guardrails to keep them moving in the right direction.
As agile enterprise architects, we give direction by conveying the business intent to everyone involved. How does our enterprise intend to support important market opportunities and business capabilities while satisfying the needs of our customers, regulators, employees, and other stakeholders?
As an agile enterprise architect, you:
Prioritize business value:
by analyzing the enterprise architecture, you can identify which business goals are supported by specific features and how important those are. This prevents decibel-driven prioritization, where the loudest voices get their wishes granted.
Co-ordinate work:
understanding dependencies helps you plan and collaborate with others. Simply put, if feature A depends on feature B, build feature B first (or in parallel). Perhaps you could even remove this dependency altogether. This is not just about software. Also think of improving staff skills, adapting business processes, involving business partners, etc.
Manage architectural debt:
by having an agile Enterprise Architecture, you can manage shortcut solutions that are allowed today for reasons relating to speed, but need to be refactored tomorrow to avoid problems in the longer term. It’s not about avoiding shortcut solutions, but paying back the ‘debt’ in time.
Artificial Intelligence gives architects advanced abilities
Trend 6: Artificial Intelligence driven
Enterprise Architecture
With Artificial Intelligence (AI) already impacting many areas of our personal lives, it’s not difficult to imagine its impact on the practice and value of enterprise architecture too. The famous engineer, futurist and humanist Sir Arthur C. Clarke already predicted in the 1960s: “The most intelligent inhabitants of our future world won’t be men or monkeys, they’ll be machines…”.
For us, this means that AI will transform how we do Enterprise Architecture and how enterprises go about change. Understanding the impact of this trend today helps to reimagine the future of Enterprise Architecture.
“In essence, AI is about machines that can learn, reason, and act for themselves. They can make their own decisions when faced with new situations, in the same way, that humans and animals can.”
– Karen Hao, senior AI editor at MIT Technology Review
AI is a comprehensive concept that is constantly evolving. In today’s enterprises, AI revolutionizes data and analytics and assists executives and other decision-makers by providing insights into vast amounts of information.
Matthijs Scholten
Product and Innovation manager at Bizzdesign
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““Artificial Intelligence provides enterprise architects with advanced abilities, by providing smarter design practices which result in faster decision-making and more intelligent architectures.”
The enterprise architecture practice is transitioning to become a product (versus taking a project approach)
Trend 2: Enterprise Architecture as a ‘product’: measuring strategic value
Our roles as architects are changing. More enterprises are now considering Enterprise Architecture as a strategic capability to address their transformation challenges in a rapidly evolving environment. We’re no longer viewed as a ‘nice to have’ or as ‘academics’. Therefore, as architects, we can’t continue to practice ‘old school’ enterprise architecture. We must become more strategic, more agile. How can we achieve this?
Regard your enterprise architecture practice as an agile product or service (versus following a project-focused approach). Therefore, embed enterprise architecture activities into well-defined value streams and deliver these to the enterprise as a part of daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly governance and outcomes.
Treat the enterprise architecture practice just like any other product or service to customers, with formal ownership and management. The owner needs to organize the enterprise architecture offerings according to well-defined value streams that create value for customers and the organization. There needs to be a big focus on creating customer value and customer-centricity.
By taking this approach, your team could define key metrics and KPIs to explicitly measure the value created from these value streams. Deliver targeted business outcomes based on customer value as captured in customer stories and measured in the value stream metrics. Focus on the capability improvements required to deliver customer value.
Know your customer
Understand your internal customers, their challenges, and how they consume your enterprise architecture products.
Define Value Streams
Align the enterprise architecture product with the organization’s Value Streams. This ties Enterprise Architecture to the daily operation of the organization and defines the way that products are embedded into daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly activities and outcomes.
Understand the Capabilities
As a part of Value Stream mapping, align the enterprise architecture capabilities required to support each Value Stream.
Describe the value
Ensure that the product aligns to key value-driven outcomes that can be measured.
Track result
Capture and track metrics that articulate the value obtained.
Improve the product
Treat the products like any other with releases that target customers’ needs and with improvements over time.
Dan Belville
Senior Pre-Sales
Consultant
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“Make Enterprise Architecture more relevant and powerful by embedding it into the daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly DNA of the enterprise.”
"Make Enterprise Architecture more relevant and powerful by embedding it into the daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly DNA of the enterprise."
Leverage competitive differentiator business capabilities for new sources of growth
The pace of change in business is faster than ever before and will continue to increase, given the availability and accessibility of new technologies and cloud services. But while digital technologies offer the potential to radically change business and operating models, innovation is not just about technology.
Business model innovation is all about identifying target customers with a problem that needs solving. Firstly, there is value in solving the problem (i.e., the customer is willing to pay for it). Secondly, you have the capabilities to solve the problem, either directly or in collaboration with partners, and thirdly, you can create a sustainable business by solving the problem.
These three factors are typically characterized as desirability (you have a solution that your target customer wants to buy), feasibility (you can actually deliver your solution) and viability (you can deliver your solution at a profit – or at least in a way that creates value for you and your customer).
Many organizations seek new sources of growth – or, for more mission-driven organizations, looking for new ways of achieving their (non-profit-driven) goals – through the development of new value propositions.
Trend 3: Capability-driven business model innovation: adding new sources of growth
Very often, this starts with strategy and involves the enterprise architecture team supporting analysis of existing business capabilities to identify where improvements are needed to achieve targeted goals. This analysis supports gap closure scenario modeling and planning of gap closure initiatives. More often than not, it involves analyzing how technology and data support this capability development. But, in its full strength, Enterprise Architecture can also drive strategy and innovation.
An innovative Bizzdesign customer in financial services posed a challenge to their enterprise architecture team. They needed to support the development of new value propositions that leverage their key business capabilities where they have a competitive advantage. Based on their capability analysis, they identified cybersecurity risk management as a high-mature capability; an area where there was also a significant need – and capability gap – in their existing customer base. And so, the Enterprise Architecture team supported the development of a new proposition for their customers to help them manage their cybersecurity, using the in-house expertise they already had.
Enterprise architects have often played a role in innovation. As architects, we help our organizations harness technology for business benefit, and particularly mapping new and emerging technologies to the business capabilities that they enable.
But we also have an opportunity to play a greater role in value creation by looking beyond the boundaries of our organization. We can partner with executives to explore and exploit new opportunities enabled by existing business capabilities.
As enterprise architects we should:
Partner with innovation teams to understand the innovation portfolio and assess existing business capabilities that may enable new value propositions
Partner with business teams to understand customer needs, pains, and gains. We need to help connect these with new value propositions enabled by key capabilities and provide business modeling support to define new business and operating models.
Provide scenario modeling, business impact assessment, and roadmapping services to support the scale-up and benefits realization of new business ideas.
Jeeps Rekhi
Customer Success
Consultant
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“Architects can play a role in value creation by partnering with executives to exploit new opportunities enabled by existing business capabilities.”
Embed security in digital transformation to ensure a secure and resilient enterprise
Your board of directors wants to be in the news for the right reasons. Having your business operations interrupted by ransomware or having private customer data leaked on the internet are definitely not the right reasons.
The reality is that cyber threats are not going away any time soon and represent a multi-billion dollar industry for threat actors, which often include well-organized groups and state sponsors. The potential impacts can be major: compromises of critical infrastructure and strategic assets can be life-threatening, pose strategic economic risks or represent existential risks for corporations.
Boards need to prioritize risk management investments based on business risk and benefits, but too often, they lack the right information to do this effectively.
As enterprises transform digitally, data becomes the critical asset fueling digital business. But the attack surface necessarily increases as business activities become
Trend 4: Secure by Design: architects bring an enterprise-wide business perspective
ever more closely driven by technology, and increasingly that technology is located in the cloud. Traditional forms of cybersecurity risk management, such as perimeter-based security, are no longer sufficient. And so new approaches are required.
However, the cybersecurity market is highly fragmented and still typically uses checklist-based compliance approaches, rather than risk-based proactive management. It focuses on attack prevention rather than more holistic ‘secure by design’ resilience, with endless ‘detect and correct’ cycles that simply cannot keep pace with the emerging threat landscape.
What’s missing is the ability to connect sources of risk – the technologies, infrastructure, and people – with the business impacts of risk, such as business services, capabilities, business processes being interrupted, or the impacts of data being leaked. This needs to be done in such a way as to enable more effective communication and collaboration between business and technology stakeholders to make better risk treatment decisions.
For example, by having instant visibility of the ‘technology footprint’ of Log4J and the business activities it impacts, technology teams can quickly identify and prioritize remediation patching activities for vulnerabilities. They could also minimize ‘time-to-resolution’ of this threat.
As enterprise architects, we could play a key role in partnering with cybersecurity teams to establish the ‘connective tissue of the enterprise’. This allows all stakeholders to better identify and understand risks on a common coherent basis and provide a business perspective for better prioritization and security return on investment management.
Enterprise architecture models already connect technology, data, and business concepts in coherent models, supporting analysis from multiple perspectives. These models can easily be extended with a ‘security overlay’, enabling security teams to add threats, vulnerabilities, control objectives, and control requirements. This enables faster and more effective risk identification and business impact analysis, and enterprise-wide reporting with full consistency and transparency.
Enterprise and security architects could also partner to create the reference architectures and design patterns for new cloud-based zero trust architectures. This enables solution architects and agile teams to create ‘secure by design’ solutions that build in security from the outset, enabling greater speed and agility for the enterprise while ensuring security and resilience.
Nick Reed
Chief Strategy
Officer
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“Architects and cybersecurity teams establish the ‘connective tissue of the enterprise’. We provide a business perspective for security prioritization and return on investment management.”
“They say there are two types of enterprise: those that have had a major cybersecurity incident, and those that admit they’ve had a major cybersecurity incident.”
Faster execution, with earlier value for the customer and increased revenue for the vendor
Technology vendors are acquiring adjacent technologies and facilitating ‘app marketplaces’ to increase their platforms’ supported functional scope, either by adding their own functionality or via third party-developed apps on their platforms.
A key benefit for enterprises is that these platforms are now leveraged for maximum value creation and multiple use cases via a single vendor contract. Enterprises can easily and quickly configure and extend these platforms to support additional use cases other than their original intended purposes. Examples include supporting pricing configuration (CPQ) in addition to customer relationship management (CRM) or supporting governance, risk and compliance (GRC) in addition to IT service management (ITSM).
A key challenge for platform vendors and enterprises is how to drive value creation (and platform adoption) as fast and effectively as possible. As architects, we can play a key role.
Trend 5: Enterprises multi-purposing big tech: Enterprise Architecture drives value on both sides
To drive value creation, architects can identify business capabilities that can be digitalized, automated, reimagined, and re-platformed onto the vendor’s products. Here, a capability-led Enterprise Architect analysis can help identify the best business opportunities for value creation and provide clarity and transparency around the teams, business processes, and data involved in how the capability is performed. It can also help prioritize and sequence these opportunities into strategic roadmaps based on value and dependency analysis.
We could also plan the re-platforming of transformations and identify the key risks and dependencies in their execution. This is done to minimize the risks of conflicting workstreams or key dependencies being missed and to enable earlier decommissioning of legacy systems.
The key is that a capability-led analysis supports a business outcome-focused discussion about how to achieve strategic goals, enabling both the vendor and customer to participate in a shared dialogue in business terms, with technology playing a supporting, enabling role.
But while Enterprise Architecture may become a key competence for platform vendors, tooling is something where the ‘as-a-Service’ model provides an accessible, scalable model for platform vendors to partner for success. They can leverage repository-based reusable reference models and components across multiple customers and engagements.
As architects, we can drive value, either on the vendor or the customer’s side, by:
Creating (or using, if on the vendor side) the capability models to frame the business outcome dialogue, highlighting key strategic capabilities, and describing the associated operating models in terms of people, process data, and technology.
Partnering with business leaders and platform vendor solution architects/ value engineering teams to identify capability improvement opportunities that the platform can enable and designing target future state architecture.
Building strategic roadmaps for platform adoption, highlighting which capability improvements are enabled and which legacy systems are decommissioned with associated value and benefits realization.
Highlighting key risks and dependencies for change execution teams.
Joost Niehof
Managing Consultant
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“Capability-led analysis supports an outcome-focused discussion enabling both the vendor and customer to participate in a shared dialogue in business terms”
Get ahead of change – map and analyze environmental strategies to analyze, plan, and make improvements
The planet is warming. Climate change encompasses the rise of average temperatures and extreme weather events. In the past year, unfortunately, we have seen many examples of this. Climate change has turned into something very real and urgent, and it's a global challenge that affects us all. But, with the right mindset and focus, there is a lot we can do to make small personal contributions and larger 'system changes'. Our organizations can, and should, play a key role in this. With technology on our side, new challenges can also lead to huge opportunities to distinguish and excel.
In just a couple of years, sustainability has found its place in organizations' strategic agendas. Organizations broadcast on their websites that they're on a 'path towards carbon neutrality'. But how will they achieve this?
"To be a sustainable business, first bring your operations into compliance in terms of all environmental regulations using Enterprise Architecture."
Trend 7: Address and improve sustainability: extend your architecture models
Embracing sustainability is more than just 'planting a couple of trees'. It is and will increasingly become a big driver for (fundamental) change. Sustainability is now prioritized next to other drivers used to run and grow a business. This dominant driver introduces additional dimensions and metrics to measure performance, make decisions, and track change. Dealing with multiple dimensions in coherence is what Enterprise Architecture is all about. So, as an Enterprise Architect, you should lean in and claim your role!
A growing number of organizations are explicitly including sustainability metrics in their Enterprise Architecture models. Enterprise Architecture methods and tools allow you to map and analyze the carbon footprint of different elements in your organization and then calculate and roll-up scores to capabilities, geographies, business units, and service lines. Lean techniques to reduce waste also provide a proven way to improve efficiencies. Enterprise Architecture provides the tools to heatmap the areas where the biggest improvements can be made, analyze the impact of change, and plan initiatives and projects to meet sustainability goals set by organizations, governments, and society.
A major benefit of using Enterprise Architecture in strategic decision-making is its multi-dimensional approach. Making the best decisions is all about finding an optimum between the dominant dimensions at play. This includes current metrics (like cost, value, risk), but also future options. Investing in sustainability now could bring extra costs in the short term but might lead to future options, opportunities, and savings in the longer run. By creating and using, impactful insights from your connected current- and future-state architectures, you'll make better decisions and get better results, thereby improving your chances of leading the pack in your business.
How will Enterprise Architecture support your journey towards a green, profitable, and successful future?
Peter Matthijssen
Chief Product Officer
Follow me on Linkedin
"Use Enterprise Architecture methods and tools to map and analyze the carbon footprint of different elements in your organization."
About Bizzdesign
We believe that success should not be a matter of hope but that it should be by design. With our trusted global SaaS Enterprise Architecture platform, we help architects and executives see a complete multi-dimensional picture, find and design the right path, and execute with confidence to their targeted future.
For more information, visit bizzdesign.com or Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
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AI can improve data quality by cleaning and structuring data and then discovering new patterns that can radically improve the performance of supply chains, business operations, and technologies. We’re currently only scratching the surface of the ‘art of the possible’, and many enterprises have recently piloted their first promising AI implementations. A major challenge of this decade is to effectively scale AI foundations and apps throughout the enterprise.
However, AI also brings many benefits to Enterprise Architecture. AI can assist us to achieve business outcomes in the following ways:
1. Effortless current state: integrating different data sources into your Enterprise Architecture repository with the help of AI will boost your current state architecture understanding, allowing architects to focus on future state design.
2. Next-generation visuals: AI will create amazing interfaces to captivate your target audience. For example, architecture models are presented as intuitive 3D visuals and holograms.
3. Faster decision-making: using AI to learn about your enterprises’ architecture patterns will enable you to craft complete impact analyses at high speeds to guide complex change scenarios.
cture over time.
4. Architecture design recommendations: with Enterprise Architecture models providing a ‘pattern language’ to understand and design organizations, AI allows you to predict and recommend design patterns when designing new architectures.
5. Intelligent enterprise architectures: AI can suggest improvements to existing architectures for scenarios that you haven’t thought of before based on Enterprise Architecture data. This will result in smarter architecture over time.
AI brings speed and intelligence to the Enterprise Architecture discipline. To start harnessing the benefits of AI, we recommend that you partner with the AI teams in your enterprise. Bizzdesign also has extensive experience in this area - we’re currently implementing new AI techniques to enable faster and smarter modeling of our Bizzdesign HoriZZon platform. We can help you use AI to provide faster and more intelligent insights. Contact us for a conversation today.
