Architecture will not disappear, but architects will have to adapt a lot

A few days ago I spoke with Christoph Witte from JavaSpektrum about the future state of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and its relevancy in a Cloud native world. I remain convinced of the central role of enterprise architecture in companies. However I believe that EA can play a bigger role in the transition from a project-oriented to product-oriented IT. Here is an extract of the interview, translated to English. The full interview can be found in the printed or digital version of JavaSpektrum.

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Christoph Witte: Aren't the features you just described, such as monitoring, cost control, and repository, more part of the traditional toolbox of EAM and the watchdog function that many IT and business professionals have come to value in the eyes of enterprise architects?

André Christ: In the context of Covid-19 this is partly true. However, the last area, the transparency of applications for all employees via a portal, already clearly points to the more modern role of Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM). This is more about active support and collaboration with IT and the business side. We see this especially with customers who are currently working on cloud transformations or other large projects such as the switch to SAP S4/HANA. It's not primarily about controlling and governance, but rather about connecting departments across the board or about ensuring that business departments understand the transformation roadmap and can provide feedback on it. With a restrictive enterprise architecture, such projects can no longer be managed at all. 

Christoph: Do the majority of the architecture departments still act as watchdogs over the portfolio or have they already changed their position?

André: I can only speak from the experience we have had with our customers working with our collaborative product. On average, 50 active users per month work with our tool in the client companies. If you now consider that there are usually two to three architects per company, it becomes very clear that these companies also work very collaboratively with other departments. For those who develop a lot themselves, business engineers, software developers and project managers use our tool in addition to the architects. For those who rely more on standard software, we find IT controllers, buyers, process analysts, for example.

Christoph: Does the enterprise architecture continue to differentiate itself and does this differentiation help in leaving the classic role of the guardian?

André: Differentiation based on the needs of the company will certainly help. However, the extent to which the function is broken down strongly depends on the level of maturity of the architecture and on the task at hand. I recently had a conversation with a chief architect (Markus Rink, Head of Global Technology Architecture at E.ON) whose company currently has to deal with a very large merger. He sees differentiation in technology- & security architecture, in business-, application- and data-architecture as well as in experience- & product-architecture. Full blog article here - this is the video of my conversation:

Christoph: Are there any other developments that contribute to a more modern interpretation of the EA role?

The change from a project to a product organization. In the first, at the beginning of a large project, a target architecture is defined that is to last for several years. After that, development takes place and architecture and development have little to discuss with each other. This is different with the product approach. You start with a minimal viable product, which is further developed in terms of design and functionality, but also in terms of architecture. The reason for this is that a pilot product is only used by a few people, whereas a mass product aims at many users and therefore needs a completely different architecture. In other words, in a product organization you have to exchange ideas much more often. The dialog between architecture, development and the business side is necessary because otherwise the product cannot function. (See here for a recent blog article about the shift to a product centric IT).

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Christoph: Let's talk about Cloud. More and more services are being developed cloud-native or "serverless", often on the platform of a hyperscaler. Does architecture management still play a role at all in such scenarios? Do these user companies, which work very closely with a cloud provider and use its Platform-as-a-Service, still consider architecture management at all? 

André: Architecture remains important on the one hand because many companies are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy, and on the other hand because clouds rarely exist in their pure form, but mostly use hybrid approaches, i.e. only a part of the workloads resides in the cloud and other parts remain on-premises. Architecture plays an important role here, just think of security and authentication or data management.

Our analyses show that only 26 percent of business applications are in the cloud. And architecture plays a central role in this transformation. Questions about the selection of cloud services or questions about the transformation of the application itself must be answered. It rarely makes sense to simply lift and shift an on-prem application to a virtual instance in the cloud. Therefore: The architecture will not disappear, but the architects must adapt significantly. Without an understanding of what the various cloud architectures offer, enterprise architects will no longer be able to provide sufficient support for their companies.

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Do you agree with my thoughts? What is your view? I'm looking forward to receive your feedback and comments here.

Thank you to Christoph Witte for the great conversation. The full interview can be found in the printed or digital version of JavaSpektrum.