Making sure that we create alignment between the needs that we see in the markets that customers and prospects want and what we build with the product, aligning our product delivery, service delivery and sales teams must be one of the top priorities of an enterprise. And for that, businesses must understand where the market is heading and what the future of architecture is.
The future of enterprise architecture (EA), is kind of going to determine which companies will flourish, which companies will not.
Entity Adaptability Determines the Success of a Company
Like living beings that could only adapt to the rapidly changing habits survived over centuries, adapting to this new reality where we have like big data, machine learning, AI, local hubs, etc, and to the fading boundaries between business and IT is also very critical for enterprises.
Agility and adaptability define a company’s chances of survival and one of the key things that are critical for organizations. When we look at architecture, we’re always talking about venturing the gap between business and IT. That’s what makes companies very slow.
This whole new reality calls for rethinking the positions and AEA practices within a company and how all different stakeholders will be connected.
You have a business, and you need a solution to do business better. If organizations want to make sure that they deliver the right solutions from their departments that fit the needs of the people working in the business, it works. But the world is changing fast. So the first question that you should ask yourselves as organizations is, what actually is the business?
Many C-Level executives seldom introduce themselves by the business they are in. They only will tell you what their specific role is within that business is.
Business & IT
In enterprise market architecture, we always talk about business. And business is that single thing that the IT department works for.
For an enterprise architect, it’s critical for him/her to understand the differences in nuances. Because if he understands those nuances differences, he can make sure that he supports the business people in the right way in making their decisions.
The business is not a single thing. But it exists out of all sorts of people functions and roles. And that is not where it stops. In today’s world, we’re going to make it even more difficult than it already was. Because the gap between business and IT functions are fading.
Architecture
Architecture is the glue that brings all those people with different roles and different perspectives together. It’s about centralization. We used to live in a world where you had a central place where the IT department facilitated the rest of the organization. It’s all those different organizations, all those different roles, to do their work today that come up with solutions.
Some enterprises don’t even have an IT department anymore. The market things teams, my sales teams, my financial teams, they are savvy enough to buy their own SAS tools. They use low code automation tools to build integrations, they use low code things to build their own apps. And nobody requires anything to be built by his own internal team. And surely, everyone has a development team.
Yet, for some functions like Marketing and Sales, IT departments still exist. They’re quite big, they do a lot of very useful work that is still very necessary. But I think it’s very clear the gap between business and it is getting smaller. Everywhere you have local cloud is SAS and AI machine learning. There are many of these hybrid functions like, product management and product ownership, where it’s hard to define if they’re it, or if they’re actually business. And this has far stretching effects for EA. It’s been set for ages already. So I think it’s nothing new.
But I think this is the year where you really have to change the role of enterprise architects in your organization, and break it apart from it. EA and architecture in general is not an IT future. Architects exist to support the optimization of your business with your organization, your operating model, and to achieve the optimization of the business and operating model.
But as you’re working as the main area of work that focuses on optimization of the business, you literally have to work with all of the business. This means that EA is not only responsible for sharing visualizations, with people that consume them throughout the organization, but EA should actively support decision making throughout the organization, it should facilitate people throughout the organization to actively engage in architecture, so not just to consume it, but to take part in it. And to add them to the architecture repository to support their own way of working.
EA Must Support Decision Making Across Organization
The architects should not be the ones managing and maintaining the repository by themselves. They should facilitate the rest of the organization to make sure that they can ask for a repository.
Architecture needs to become part of every strategic and tactical role in your organization. I think EA is basically following the path that so many other industries and disciplines have followed already. It’s the path of democratization.
Today, we all have our supercomputer in our pocket, meaning that we have more functionality than ever before. And we don’t even have to go to machine rule, we don’t even have to go to our desk anymore, we can just take it out of our pocket, and help us to make the right decisions of where we want to go, how we’re going to send an email, which decision we’re kind of making.
This self-service way of doing that has really enabled organizations to be much more efficient, much more transparent, much more effective. And I think this is what we want to achieve with EA, as well.
Decentralization vs. Functionalities
I think decentralization is much more important than actual functionalities. A desktop computer can already do quite a lot of calculations, just like a supercomputer. Still, we wanted to have that phone in our pocket, because we would have it available at any place at any time. And that is where you want to get your architecture to decentralized and used. And the computer industry is not the only one where this is happening.
Another great example is the printing industry. Initially, desktop printers were actually laughed at, because you had these huge printing machines that could print 1000s of pages within a minute. And then you have this desktop printer that you can set at home. And it took more than a minute to print a single page. And of course, these large printing machines that are really, really fast, still have use cases like printing your daily paper. But in the day-to day life and within organization, the desktop printer has gained so much more grace than these large printers because, decentralization is more important than functionality.
The Future of EA
The future of EA is one that is data driven, and completely powered by machine learning. Today, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is all about AI, IoT, etc. But above all, in my opinion, it’s about data.
Because if you look at the enormous mess of data, the enormous amounts of data we produce, not to mention data being produced by machines and devices, it’s incredible. But with that, comes a lot of challenges as well. So how do we manage and maintain the quality of your data? Or how are you going to standardize the way you handle data? And how are you gonna make sure you will be able to find that needle in the haystack? If you look at the enormous pile of data we’re all sitting on, there’s no single truth, there’s no single solution. But now, with the help of AI/ML, it can show you different solutions or actions for different contexts and that is being set up as today’s EA. Imagine you, as an enterprise architect, could have a digital artificial construct, which, based on changes that are kind of made at – for example, strategy & direction, then organization, automatically determines the possible impact this could have on the rest of the organization.
A New Reality With AI/ML
We’re in this new reality where artificial intelligence and machine learning will play a significant role in EA whenever there’s a change within the landscape or from organization, to spiritual assistant, analyzing data, objects that are relevant to the church, what kind of change relative to the change is difficult. This digital assistant will provide the Enterprise Architect with an overview of the impact and risks the JCS architecture is within the landscape, supporting intuitive, data driven decision making.
A lot of organizations don’t use AI machine learning at this moment. Some are already experimenting. Some say that it’s part of their decision making mechanism. And I think that’s good, because no one actually knows what it can do for for organizations already.
Role Of The Enterprise Architect In The AI/ML Era
With the adaptability and agility being critical given the gap of business activating and with all these new technologies, what is the role of the Enterprise Architect? What’s the role of EA.
Within the past few years, the EA is changing rapidly. And with the most important function of EA, being the optimization of the business and the operating model, architecture will play a key role in facilitating strategic and tactical decision making, empowering leaders to do their work and depositions in the right way.
Conclusion
When EA turns out to become one of the critical functions in an organization, one is not going to get away with not being alive in a more agile way. Adoption of the full agile framework with agility will be the need of the hour and for that organizations need to decentralize decision making, which requires EA to be adopted by the masses. We cannot wait for a few people in a room that call themselves architects to do their analysis of positions. We have to facilitate the rest of your organization to do that themselves. And if we are allowed to do that, EA can become the steering mechanism for the decision making throughout all of your organization.
So, architecture makes sure that older adults and lines are connected to make the right calls on important positions driven by the data in the central repository. And those better decisions are critical to achieving business goals, and ensures alignment between strategy and tactics and operations. One cannot do without the other.
