The core foundation for execution strategies
The need for an agile business model has never been more crucial. Especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, many industries have suffered irreparable losses that can only be recovered or avoided in the future with a more adaptable business strategy and innovation model.
Companies that had already embraced cloud infrastructure and an agile workflow adapted to the pandemic more quickly than digital laggards, who struggled with the remote work model and keeping customers happy.
EA maturity models are a way to assess the maturity of functional domains. They distinguish different maturity levels that an organization successively progresses through. As such, they can be used as a guideline for balanced incremental improvement of a functional domain.
EA is all about providing direction to IT regarding where to invest – that is, how to make the right technology choices to deliver business value. When it comes to predicting the impact on business value and outcomes, EA management tools provide crucial guiding elements for the process.
Now, let’s look at some of the typical initiatives to ensure that an EA program is being tracked correctly.
Leadership and vision
A company’s short-term tactical steps and long-term enterprise architectural vision must be aligned. To ensure EA success, leadership must take steps to ensure teams are educated on relevant initiatives, focused on business values, and equipped to do their part in moving the organization and processes toward the common end goal.
Early buy-in
It is especially helpful to get early alignment with every individual involved in the decision-making process for an organization to quickly move toward the common end goal. Buy-in across the business makes it easier to avoid unspoken concerns, uncover potential issues, or manage other factors that can derail an EA program.
Governance
Strong leadership paired with the right stakeholders in place across the board is essential to ensure tasks, milestones, and performance are moving in the right direction. Aligning the vision and interests of all stakeholders with a properly designed network is a huge challenge that will require processes to ensure teams and processes are operating as designed and intended.
Future-first design
Driving toward a future-centric approach that is in sync with leading technological advancements is imperative. EA should prepare an organization to confront known challenges and be flexible enough to leverage emerging technology. Indulging in current issues and struggles between legacy systems and innovation can be devastating when you’re trying to achieve EA business goals and values.
CIO and business leader harmony
Stakeholder leaders must work together to ensure divergent viewpoints can be heard and addressed harmoniously. When the EA infrastructure is not sturdy enough, diverse opinions can make it tricky to resolve issues that come down to technology versus business.
Balance business and technology
Some may let the technical aspects of an EA operation take over an entire business environment. A more balanced approach is better, where business and technology requirements and the strategy are considered and information is shared to ensure effective operational processes.
Balanced team
There is a world of business opportunities out there, but finding the right team that is skilled and motivated to seize this opportunity can be a struggle. Organizations should strive to assemble a team that reflects a diverse blend of individuals who, among them, possess deep business acumen, technical understanding, and enthusiasm for the vision.
Goal-oriented vision
Technical input, business process, and performance measurement come together to form the basis for gauging the benefits of EA. Leaders must establish goals that focus beyond short-term achievements and strive for long-lasting impacts for each key performance indicator (KPI) associated with the EA vision.
Interoperability and integration
In our constantly evolving digital world, a team’s ability to adapt to new changes is essential. To ensure this, the sustainability and a credible EA must be as future-proof as possible, with easy integration and operational flexibility that is supported and enforced across the board.
Solid communication
The right communication design can make or break the success of an EA organization, so this aspect of the work must not be taken lightly. Every stakeholder must be on the same page strategically speaking, and teams must be aware of the latest EA advancements within the organization. It is important to communicate the layout, benefits, and scope of the architecture.
Customer focus
Internal processes are important, but the most important stakeholder is the customer. The ultimate EA objective, business plan, and KPIs should be centered around the needs of the customer.
Resilience – the key to EA
Before and during the pandemic, EA experts have been in great demand to assist with the immediate and future migration of business applications to the cloud. They have also been engaged in multiple facets of transformation, depending on their business roadmap, risk assessment, feasibility, security, budget, development strategies, and other factors. EA teams have influenced the hastening of transformation and related processes.
EA translates company strategy into identified objectives to enable business capabilities. When executed well, EA translates business objectives into clearly defined transformation initiatives that analysts, portfolio owners, IT solution architects, and others across the business can move forward in their areas of focus.
In times of crisis, EA facilitates business continuity by focusing resources on the company’s critical capabilities and accelerating recovery once the crisis has passed by, making the most of the new environment. EA supports resiliency, which can help a business not only survive a crisis but thrive post-crisis.
The following diagram shows the process of establishing a knowledge-oriented mentality in a firm, analyzing the current knowledge, and planning the knowledge that will be needed in the future. However, the strategic level portrays identifying the existing knowledge and how to effectively and efficiently allocate that knowledge within a firm.
The operational level is about ensuring that knowledge is used in everyday practices by those who need access to the right knowledge, at the right time, at the right location:
Figure 1.1 – Scope of EA
The following table categorizes the different EA values:
Table 1.1 – The category of EA value is supported by evidence from the literature