By bridging IT and your business, enterprise architecture provides the agility you need to thrive no matter what the future holds.
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, organizations must continually adapt and evolve to stay competitive. Enterprise architecture (EA) is a discipline that aligns your business’s IT assets with its business strategy, providing the business agility and resilience needed for survival. It bridges the gap between IT and business priorities, helping people do their jobs better while saving money, making money, or both.
However, to fully realize the benefits of enterprise architecture’s holistic view of your organization, you must first establish goals around and answer questions about key business principles such as:
- Standardization: Often, companies will have more than one customer relationship management (CRM) package or more than one enterprise resource planning (ERP) package, leading to multiple expenditures and maintenance burdens. How many tools do you need to meet your goals?
- Integration: Your tools must work together in the same language, at the right times, and at the right cadence. How will you ensure your tools “talk to each other”?
- Cost optimization: Duplicate tools mean duplicate costs. How can you consolidate it, and over what time frame?
- Agility and flexibility: Your tools must be robust enough to capture new data quickly, adapt to new product lines, or accommodate the addition of a new division. How will you invest in tools and processes that can meet future needs?
- Risk management: Cybersecurity is important, of course, but so is integration. How will you use downtime effectively, maximize uptime, and get the data you need?
Once you have aligned on key business principles, you must systematically assess your IT environment. This assessment will document the tools you have — and the tools you need — to achieve your goals.
The Benefits of an Initial Enterprise Architecture Assessment
Understanding your current environment helps in two major ways. First, it will identify areas where you do not need to invest heavily in new IT assets. You likely already have many tools and applications with features you haven’t yet tapped into. Find those features and ways to use them to help prevent unnecessary, duplicative purchases.
Another benefit of knowing your current environment is that it will better prepare you to identify gaps between your IT environment and future goals. Say you need to overhaul your manufacturing process to transform your business, but your production planner has shortages on the case-fill rate for a product.
Using a combination of technologies, including AI/ML and RPA, the planner can make the best decision, whether it’s to ship from an alternate distribution center or cut the order. In this way, enterprise automation can help define not only the new technology, equipment and processes, but it can also help you define the key decision points within those processes.
An aspect of this initial assessment we cannot overstate is the human connections you will start to build — and silos you will break down — simply by encouraging your IT and business employees to solve problems together. This first assessment will help build a culture of collaboration that will be crucial to every part of your march toward enterprise automation.
Make Regular Assessments Part of Your Culture
However complete your initial assessment may be, all the hard work will be for naught if you don’t reassess your environment regularly. We don’t have to tell you how quickly software and technology change and how quickly today’s “big thing” can fall out of favor. If you don’t review your tech stack regularly — at least once a year — you risk falling behind. On the other hand, staying current can help inform the development of target architecture models.
Regular reviews also help assess the maturity of your IT governance policies. For example, if you find that your systems are full of old, irrelevant data, it may be that you need to review your data retention policies. If you update and communicate your policies but the problem persists in the next review, you may need to address a larger organizational gap before you can properly implement your policies — or you may have gaps in the policy itself.
For all these reasons, regular IT assessments are crucial for effective enterprise architecture planning and execution. They provide a detailed understanding of an organization’s current IT landscape and inform the development of target architecture models and roadmaps for IT transformation initiatives.
Enable Agility
All these assessments work toward a workplace of continuous improvement, which means continuous change. That’s good, but it can also be challenging. An Agile model can help here. Though originally created for software development, organizations now recognize its value in multiple business contexts.
The first benefit Agile brings to the table is its reliance on clear roles and responsibilities. Well-defined Agile roles like a product owner, scrum master, and scrum team member map to the responsibilities that any well-functioning team needs: someone to own the team’s output, someone to oversee the process that leads to the output, and people to perform the process. Similarly, the regular assessments described above align with Agile’s iterative methodology.
Through your regular assessments, you can begin to establish standards and best practices. Document and communicate them throughout your organization, and tie them to metrics that measure their impact. As employees see the positive effects of their work, they will be even more motivated to work together toward continuous improvement.
Establish Enterprise Architecture Governance and Centers of Excellence
The cultures of collaboration and continuous improvement that evolve from your EA initiative set the stage for more trust, which you need for better governance. Employees who work better together and see the positive outcomes from their work will want to do what it takes to keep it going. That means following standards that relate to elements of enterprise architecture, such as roles and responsibilities, metrics, and tools.
An enterprise architecture center of excellence (CoE) can also help support the development and implementation of your EA governance. CoEs are simply groups of experts gathered from across your organization to provide insight into a specific area. As a result, the CoE model delivers the holistic organization perspective that enterprise architecture demands.
Explore AI for Business Transformation
Because AI can analyze large datasets, implement natural language processing techniques, and use predictive analytics and simulation models, it has great potential for transforming your business capabilities, including augmenting enterprise architecture tools and processes. These tools provide a place to model and store data related to your EA work, as well as a platform for collaboration. When integrated with AI, they can provide more intelligent EA recommendations and smarter roadmaps.
Conclusion
Enterprise architecture bridges IT and business, enabling organizations to align their technology investments and capabilities with their strategic objectives. By providing a comprehensive framework for analyzing, designing and managing the overall IT landscape, enterprise architecture helps businesses optimize their operations, reduce costs, mitigate risks, and respond effectively to market changes and customer demands.
With the right tools, frameworks and governance practices, organizations can use enterprise architecture to drive business agility and resilience in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape.
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