Three Trends in Enterprise Architecture to Optimize IT Operations
Watch out for these three trends in enterprise architecture.
One approach to making better-informed decisions on investments in IT and business is to leverage insights from a business’s enterprise architecture (EA). EA can help capture a holistic overview of a business, swiftly identifying areas where cost savings might be made. Ed Granger, product strategist at Ardoq, shares three key enterprise architecture trends to follow.
2022 was a challenging year for companies. Recruiting – particularly for business technology roles – was difficult due to the abundance of opportunities and the complexity of roles companies offer today. Supply chains were, and continue to be, stalled, with inflation and the likelihood of a recession causing pause.
Now, more than ever, businesses must make the right, fact-based choices. However, as McKinsey points out, seven out of 10 executives are making time-pressured decisions with either too little or incorrect information on hand. How, then, can business leaders get the insights they need to ensure they make the best decisions?
When times are hard, often the first thing to be cut is a business’s headcount. However, layoffs, particularly where more technical roles are concerned, can create longer-term challenges for companies. They will need to invest time and resources into re-recruiting colleagues with specialist skills in the future. EA-derived information can help to balance this tension between a need to cut costs and to retain talent by identifying other areas to leverage for cost savings, such as IT or project spend.
See More: Is It Time for a New Enterprise Architecture for Databases?
Enterprise Architects (EAs) can also help guide decision-makers on maximizing their budgets to ensure adequate investments are made to deliver on a business’s objectives. Key to this is ensuring that different departments across a business understand one another regarding priorities and objectives. EAs can help facilitate this by bridging the information silos that traditionally exist between departments in enterprises. Cloud-native, data-driven EA tools that deliver contextualized insights to the business are one approach organizations can take to capture, maintain, and share critical information.
Here are three ways that Enterprise Architecture can support executives, particularly the CIO, and streamline the business through more chaotic times.
Shift in Focus: From Project to Product
Enterprises increasingly adopt an agile product management or continuous delivery approach to their IT over the traditional Waterfall or Plan-Build-Run model. This approach breaks down the traditional siloed “towers” focused on product development, application development and infrastructure management as separate activities and integrates them into a cross-functional team that works on all these aspects simultaneously.
A shift to Continuous Delivery sees each team organize itself around an end-to-end value stream that brings ongoing and longer-term benefits to the business rather than short-term and time-bounded “wins” for individual departments. In addition, a Continuous Delivery approach aims to change the delivery model so that teams can work independently and with less direction rather than competing with one another for resources.
In a perfect world, this model would deliver both the optimal value to customers and markets, with the IT and business operating efficiency benefits that market downturns demand; in practice, it’s difficult to optimize for both at the same time. Product teams optimized for the flow of value may not be as effective at coordinating to maximize efficiencies. Different product teams may adopt different technologies and development approaches, resulting in many people trying to do the same thing but in different ways. EAs can help here by coordinating and streamlining product-focused work by spanning teams and creating transparency around what is happening and where. This overview can help spot and address inefficiencies as they arise and help everyone within the organization align on critical deliverables.
Distributed Decision-making
Democratizing insights from an organization’s Enterprise Architecture helps make large-scale decision-making in enterprises more democratic. In this model, each team holds responsibility for the design, operation, realization and future-state direction of their own semi-independent business area. Empowering teams in this way causes a shift in power control, making decision-making more democratic and less centralized. In addition, optimizing collaboration between teams brings about more active conversation and facilitation, resulting in a freer flow of information across the business. In shifting the Enterprise Architect role to a facilitator role than that of a data warden, the democratization of Enterprise Architecture significantly impacts the enterprise, evolving how it operates and the type of tooling it needs for success.
Business Optimization
With the current economic climate, organizations must fortify themselves against leaner times and heightened competition. Digital business optimization has emerged as the best way for businesses to future-proof themselves against both. Using new EA approaches, Enterprise Architects can see across departments and spot gaps and opportunities for cost savings.
Business optimization has three pillars:
- Boosting enterprise productivity
- Improving cost efficiency
- Building a strong data-driven defense
Leveraging these insights also mean that EAs are well-placed to spot gaps in an enterprise’s defenses from a cybersecurity point of view. While cybersecurity does not contribute to revenue growth, it ensures that the business data is not left open to costly, disruptive vulnerabilities, ensuring business continuity and successful delivery of value for the organization.
Digital change initiatives fall into three stages of digital transformation: enablement, optimization and transformation. Understanding where your business sits is mission-critical to your business optimization strategy. More than 70 percent of businesses have revamped their enterprise architecture programs to address digital transformation. Leaders can expect that percentage to continue to increase.
See More: 3 Ways To Streamline IT Operations With Continuous Innovation
Moving Enterprise Architecture into the Future
Enterprise Architecture has changed. At its finest, Enterprise Architecture has consistently helped businesses adopt the right systems and solutions to drive better decisions and, ultimately, business ROI. But the perception of Enterprise Architects as the keeper of technology and data is outdated. Systems and data can no longer be centralized because the pace of business has accelerated at such a rate that it is impractical to do so. Using new EA approaches, the Enterprise Architect can ultimately distill all the “noise” surrounding the business into easy-to-digest insights to help the CIO and other executives make better, data-driven decisions.
With a turbulent economy, restricted resources and businesses facing fluctuations, it becomes even more critical to keep an eye on these three approaches. Each has the potential to help you better weather the storm in 2023 and beyond.
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