Building Business Agility through Enterprise Architecture

The holistic view that you must have as an enterprise architect, along with the experience that you gain through years in the different IT practices and working close to the business, is key to defining a strategy without forgetting the business goals and the frameworks that provide structure, order and support to the definition.

Clear Goals and Frameworks Drive Innovation

Business goals sometimes are not so clear, functional/technical silos and there is resistance to change. To address the stakeholders’ support is crucial to make things happen; to do so; you must have a strong business case for each proposal. 

Frameworks are the basis but not the magic solution; you must know how to apply the frameworks to reality and adapt according to the organizational environment and maturity, but they are helpful as a reference to reducing analysis and design time, and to lean processes that lead to business agility. Innovation and continuous improvement comes along with enterprise architecture practice implementation, adding the necessary flexibility that enables the business to innovate and make changes easier.

Composable Architecture Enables Resilience

Today, in many organizations, enterprise architecture is conceived with a limited scope and only as a design practice, often confused with business architecture. Enterprise architecture considers all architectures in designing, but the four pillars are processes, data, applications, and technology. Composable architecture is the evolution that software architecture is aiming to provide continuous evolution and resilience, but it is not possible without the holistic view of the organization and the cost associated with such composability that enterprise architecture provides.

  ​Frameworks are the basis but not the magic solution—you must know how to adapt them to reality​ 

Unify Business and IT around Shared Value

First, define what value means for the organization to set the right expectations, and align it with the EA practice implementation plan. Second, implement enterprise architecture at the C-level: the name Architecture doesn’t mean IT, it means structure and order for the organization; everybody has to be clear on that. Finally, since the biggest challenge is to make the business and IT work together, business must be clear about what it can do with the IT capabilities the organization has, and IT has to be clear where the business wants to go and provide a plan to take it there. In the meantime, define with stakeholders how much time and money they are willing to spend on throwaways.