Overview
Having covered a couple future-oriented topics on Transforming Manufacturing and The Future of IT, I thought it would good to come back to where we are with Enterprise Architecture as a critical function for promoting excellence in IT.
Overall, there is a critical balance to be struck in technology strategy today: technology-driven capabilities are advancing faster than any organization can reasonably adopt and integrate them (as is the exposure in cyber security), even if you could, the change management issues you’d cause on end users would be highly disruptive, and thereby undermine your desired business outcomes, and, in practice rapidly evolving, sustainable change is the goal, not any one particular “implementation” of the latest thing. This is what Relentless Innovation is about, referenced in my article on Excellence by Design.
Connecting Architecture back to Strategy
In the article, Creating Value Through Strategy, I laid out a framework for thinking about IT strategy at an overall level that can be used to create some focal points for enterprise architecture efforts in practice, namely:
- Innovate – leveraging technology advancements in ways that promote competitive advantage
- Accelerate – increasing speed to market/value to be more responsive to changing needs
- Optimize – improving the value/cost ratio to drive return on technology investments overall
- Inspire – creating a workplace that promotes retention and enables the above objectives
- Perform – ensuring reliability, security, and performance in the production environment
The remainder of this article will focus on how enterprise architecture (EA) plays a role in enabling each of these dimensions given the pace of change today.
Breaking it Down
Innovate
Adopting new technologies for maximum business advantage is certainly the desired end game in this dimension, but unless there is a very unique, one-off situation, the role of EA is fairly critical in making these advancements leverageable, scalable, and sustainable. It’s worth noting, by the way, that I’m specifically referring to “enterprise architecture” here, not “solution architecture”, which I would consider to be the architecture and design of a specific business solution. One should not exist without the other and, to the degree that solution architecture is emphasized without a governing enterprise architecture framework in place, the probability of significant technical debt, delivery issues, lack of reliability, and a host of other issues will skyrocket.
Where EA plays a role in promoting innovation is minimally in exploring market trends and looking for enabling technologies that can promote competitive advantage, but also, and very critically in establishing the standards and guidelines by which new technologies should be introduced and integrated into the existing environment.
Using a “modern” example, I’ve seen a number of articles of late on the role of GenAI in “replacing” or “disrupting” application development, from the low-code/no code type solutions to the SaaS/package software domain, to everywhere. While this sounds great in theory, it shouldn’t take long for the enterprise architecture questions to surface:
- How do I integrate that accumulated set of “point solutions” in any standard way?
- How do I meaningfully run analytics on the data associated with these applications?
- How do I secure these applications in a way that I’m not exposed to vulnerabilities that I would with any open-source technology (i.e., they are generated by an engine that may have inherent security gaps)?
- How do I manage the interoperability between these internally-developed/generated solutions and standard packages (ERP, CRM, etc.) that are likely a core part of any sizeable IT environment?
In the above example, even if I find way to replace existing low-code/no code solutions with a new technology, it doesn’t mean that I don’t have the same challenges as exist with leveraging those technologies today.
In the case of innovation, the highest priorities for EA are therefore: looking for new disruptive technologies in the market, defining standards to enable their effective introduction and use, and then governing that delivery process to ensure standards are followed in practice.
Accelerate
Speed to market is a pressing reality in any environment I’ve seen, though it can lead to negative consequences as I discussed in Fast and Cheap… Isn’t Good. Certainly, one of the largest barriers to speed is complexity, and complexity can come in many forms depending on the makeup of the overall IT landscape, the standards, processes, and governance in place related to delivery, and the diversity in solutions, tools, and technologies that are involved in the ecosystem as a whole.
While I talk about standards, reuse, and governance in the broader article on IT strategy, I would argue that the largest priority for EA in terms of accelerating delivery is in rationalization of solutions, tools, and technologies in use overall.
The more diverse the enterprise ecosystem is, the more difficult it becomes to add, replace, or integrate new solutions over time, and ultimately this will slow delivery efforts down to a snail’s pace (not to mention making them much more expensive and higher risk over time).
Using an example of a company that has performed many acquisitions over time, looking for opportunities to simplify and standardize core systems (e.g., moving to a single ERP versus having multiple instances and running consolidations through a separate tool) can lead to significant reduction in complexity over time, not to mention making it possible to redeploy resources to new capability development versus being spread across multiple redundant production solutions.
Optimize
In the case of increasing the value/cost ratio, the ability to rationalize tools and solutions should definitely lead to reduced cost of ownership (beyond the delivery benefit mentioned above), but the largest priority should be in identifying ways to modernize on a continual basis.
Again, in my experience, modernization is difficult to prioritize and fund until there is an end-of-life or end-of-support scenario, at which point it becomes a “must do” priority, and causes a significant amount of delivery disruption in the process.
What I believe is a much better and healthier approach to modernization is a more disciplined, thoughtful approach that is akin to “urban renewal”, where there is an annual allocation of work directed at modernization on a prioritized basis (the criteria for which should be established through EA, given an understanding of other business demand), such that significant “events” are mitigated and it becomes a way of working on a sustained basis. In this way, the delineation between “keep the lights on” (KTLO) support, maintenance (which is where modernization efforts belong), and enhancement/ build-related work is important. In my experience, that second maintenance bucket is too often lumped into KTLO work, it is underserved/underfunded, and ultimately that creates periodic crises in IT to remediate things that should’ve been addressed far sooner (as a much lower cost) if a more disciplined portfolio management strategy was in place.
Inspire
In the interest of supporting the above objectives, having the right culture and skills to support ongoing evolution is imperative. To that end, the role of EA should be in helping to inform and guide the core skills needed to “lean forward” into advanced technology, while maintaining the right level of competency to support the footprint in place.
Again, this is where having a focus on modernization can help, as it creates a means to sunset legacy tools and technologies, to enable that continuous evolution of the skills the organization needs to operate (whether internally or externally sourced).
Perform
Finally, the role of EA in the production setting could be more or less difficult depending on how well the above capabilities are defined and supported in an enterprise. To the degree standards, rationalization, modernization, and the right culture and skills are in place, the role of EA would be helping to “tune” the environment to perform better and at a lower cost to operate.
Where there is a priority need for EA is ensuring there is an integrated approach to cyber security that aligns to development processes (e.g., DevSecOps) and a comprehensive, integrated strategy to monitor and manage performance in the production environment so that production incidents (using ITIL-speak) can be minimized and mitigated to the maximum degree possible.
Wrapping Up
Looking back on the various dimensions and priorities outlined above in relation to the role of EA, perhaps there isn’t much that I can argue is very different than what the role entailed five or ten years ago… establish standards, simplify / rationalize, modernize, retool, govern… that being said, the pace at which these things need to be accomplished and the criticality of doing them well is more important than ever with the increasing role technology plays in the digital enterprise. Like other dimensions required to establish excellence in IT, courageous leadership is where this needs to start, because it takes discipline to do things “right” while still doing them at a pace and with an agility that discerns the things that matter to an enterprise versus those that are simply ivory tower thinking.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
-CJG 03/27/2024
Organized Chaos 