As I work from my home amid the COVID-19 crisis, I can’t help but think that the need for Enterprise Architecture is greater than ever. Now is a time when organizations need to be thinking about the changes they need to make in order to survive and eventually to prosper in this new world.
Many business leaders may overlook the role of Enterprise Architecture in these changes, believing it to be mainly a technical concern.
In reality, Enterprise Architecture is about alignment—aligning people, processes, and technologies to achieve business goals. It’s also about aligning to navigate significant change and disruption successfully.
Unfortunately, as I shared in my “What is Enterprise Architecture?” post, this is broken in most organizations, and they’ll struggle to leverage EA effectively—even during the times they need it most.
We essentially help companies build or rebuild Enterprise Architecture programs. Typical drivers for these engagements have included:
Change is difficult. If you think about most companies today, they are complex machines made up of people, process and technology. The problem is that this machine was never designed—it just evolved over time.
I was recently working with a 100 year old company in the food service space that distributes all across the US. No one designed that company to be what it is today. It started 100 years ago and every year since they made investments and changed the company. They added people, process and technology and continually altered the design.
And now, when you try to make an investment you can’t pull out the schematics for this complex machine to see how it is designed. You can’t pull out those schematics and say, “OK, if we change this, what’s going to happen?”
This is a key part of Enterprise Architecture. EA can help you to understand the complex machine and thus enable more effective improvements. You may not have full schematics, but you will have a much better understanding of how people, process and technology work together to deliver your business.
Now, there are ways to go about this that are less effective. A lot of architects try to document everything to create a full set of schematics. The problem is that this takes too long and delivers little value in the short term.
At Eliassen Group, we take a more practical Enterprise Architecture approach. We consider what you are trying to change and what you need to know to effectively design that change. From there we focus on those specific areas to document and create understanding. This improves your ability to design and implement the improvement. It allows you to deliver the results you want and avoids any nasty surprises.
In the case where we are working with the business on either a Cloud, business or digital transformation, we’ll typically start by helping that program to clearly define what they are trying to achieve. We spell out the goals of the program and align those goals to the overall business strategy.
From there, we use a business capability-based approach that engages the business units in the planning. It does an exceptional job of defining the benefits that you are going to achieve and defines the scope of the program. We answer key questions:
The result is a program that has a viable and well-defined roadmap that is aligned to achieve the desired results. This is what Enterprise Architecture is all about.
We hope you are finding new ways to thrive during this time, and that you’ll reach out to us for guidance along the way. We’re here to help.
Also, if you’re interested in evaluating your current EA capabilities, we invite you to check out our complimentary, interactive assessment below.