Consistency in Enterprise Architecture

Author of the chapter: S. Manwani  (original publication: Digital Cookbook Series)

The digitalisation journey entails a comprehensive business model transformation. Alongside the formulation of the business model changes, it is crucial to investigate the modifications to enterprise architecture (EA) necessary to support the digital transformation. EA looks at key dimensions and layers of the operating model of an enterprise, describes them and analyses their dependencies. As an analogy, the construction plans of a building depict how floor layout, wall construction, electricity circuits, plumbing and construction materials are used to design and enhance a building that matches the budgets and expectations of the owners. Similarly, EA facilitates the need to keep the various operational dimensions of an enterprise well architected and balanced. Such dimensions include: organisation, process, data, applications, platforms and skills. The disparity between the as-is and the to-be state of the enterprise in these dimensions helps determine the joint transformation initiatives across the business and its IT. Literature is available[1] to describe how EA aligns with strategy development and execution.

Enterprise Architecture is a key enabler of consistency in digital transformation

Enterprise architects face many challenges, as illustrated in a Forbes article, which states that ‘misdirected enterprise Architecture initiatives vastly outnumber bona fide examples of Enterprise Architecture efforts leading to measurable business value.’[2] This is problematic since, with the advent of disruptive digital technologies, EA is critical to helping redesign business and operating models.

Digital can create value by allowing a company to create new online products, establish a multi-channel strategy, run analytics or increase process automation.

In a digital world, established companies need to up their game if they are going to survive and thrive. But incumbents face challenges that start-ups do not have; they have processes and systems ingrained over many years. A recent online EA survey with more than 100 respondents to date, run by McKinsey and Henley Business School, and targeted at CIOs, EA heads and business leaders, found that tackling complexity arising from poorly connected systems is perceived as a goal of equal importance to digital transformation, with both present in more than 60% of companies. This complexity inhibits progressive change. The core findings of the survey are highlighted below.

As seen in the figure below, digital business models are often seen as a major disruption given the opportunities that emerging technologies offer. An encouraging finding was that, in most organisations, digital transformation was high on the EA agenda.[3]

According to Gartner,[4] EA needs a bimodal capability to ensure both agile digital innovation and a stable foundation. The survey found that most companies are using agile approaches, but with different flavours. 

About half the companies are using agile mainly for fast-moving applications. The remainder, fairly evenly split, are at opposite ends, mostly using agile or not using it at all. 

Business-IT alignment enabled by enterprise architecture improves business benefits

There is support in the McKinsey-Henley EA survey for the existence of agility and stability as conflicting goals. Companies with digital high on their agenda typically have more point-to-point connections, a lower quality of business process documentation and less reuse of services. We can conclude that, in the drive for agility, there is a resulting increase in IT complexity. A related survey finding was that while digital transformation is a key objective of EA in most companies, reduction in complexity is seen to be at least as important as digitalisation. 

Perhaps the biggest difficulty for enterprise architects is that fewer than 60% of respondents believed that business colleagues were aware of what EA does. On a more positive note, where EA is contributing to digital, there is greater business–IT alignment utilising EA artefacts, such as capability and process models, and this results in greater business benefits.

Gartner has termed these types of leaders as vanguard architects, in contrast to those dealing with foundation architecture.

These findings emphasise the importance of leadership in attracting and retaining top EA talent, particularly vanguard architects. Here it seems that Herzberg’s hygiene and motivating factors come into play, with enterprise architects more incentivised by interesting challenges and recognition than by money. 

Novel digital capabilities must be embedded into existing, complex corporate context

How do EA leaders help companies go digital? There are two main levers. The first is that they have a deep understanding of how to connect the large number of processes and systems in most organisations. If someone is not designing the equivalent of your heating, water and electrics, then it may become increasingly complex and costly. A corollary is that enterprise architects know the techniques of efficient digital transformation, for example when and how to design a central hub with services to users rather than connecting everything point-to-point.

The second lever is that top EA leaders are proactive and engaged with the CxO team in strategic planning. They help challenge and redesign the business and operating models to link with enhanced processes and systems. The survey found that top EA leaders spend more time on this activity and use EA artefacts such as capability models to expand business–IT alignment. As a result, they focus more strongly on measuring and delivering business benefits, up to twice as much as their least effective peers. In summary, research shows that EA has a potentially huge contribution to make in the journey to a digital enterprise.

[1]        Ross, J. W., Weill, P., Robertson, D. C.: ‘Enterprise Architecture as Strategy’, Harvard Business Review Press, p. 6ff, 2006.

[2]        Bloomberg, J.: ‘Is Enterprise Architecture Completely Broken?’, Forbes, 2014.

[3]        Informatica: ‘Transform the enterprise – or be left behind’, Informatica, 2016.

[4]        Golden, B.: ‘What Gartner’s Bimodal IT Model Means to Enterprise CIOs’, CIO, 2015.

About the Author

Sharm Manwani is Executive Professor of IT Leadership at Henley Business School. He has extensive prior experience as a multinational CIO, led several business and IT transformations, primarily in the consumer goods industry, and is the author of ‘IT Enabled Business Change’, which is aligned to a professional qualification. Currently, he leads professional development programmes in business design and enterprise architecture, including a European multi-business school collaboration. He is also conducting research with McKinsey into enterprise architecture and its contribution to digital transformation.

About 'Modelling for Digital: Best Practices for Digital Transformation in Everyday Project Life [Practitioner Edition]'

In this edition, we focus on the practitioner. We mean those colleagues, who conduct the day-to-day work in the concrete projects delivering digital capabilities. Some aspects presented here are very specific to digitalisation projects, while others are general best practices in projects and hence also apply to digitalisation projects. In digitalisation undertakings, however, speed is of the essence, and a certain explorative approach must be chosen in order to match the needs of the customers best. At the same time, security is a pervasive challenge, as is compliance.

About the 'Digital Cookbook' series

Digitalisation is highly relevant in our private and business lives, and it is better to face up to the changes it drives. Setting aside the sociological, cultural and macroeconomic changes driven by digitalisation in our societies, our focus here is on the microeconomic impacts on our businesses. It is probably the biggest upheaval for society and the economy in this century. 

Altogether, 'Modelling for Digital', 'Managing for Digital' and 'Digital in Action' assist you in the shaping, planning and execution of a comprehensive transformation of the status quo (and you should not settle for less). It will accompany you and your business in meeting this challenge, to open up opportunities unthinkable even just a couple of years ago. It provides the context and best practices for such initiatives from a variety of industries, businesses and viewpoints, strategic, functional, operational, technical and executional. The authors lay out a general, abstracted vision of digitalization across different industries.

About the authors of the 'Digital Cookbook' series

Dirk Krafzig spent the greatest part of his professional life working for large enterprises. As the author of the bestselling book 'Enterprise SOA – Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices', Dirk coined the term 'SOA' and the concepts behind it in 2004. Today almost all large organisations in the world apply service orientation as the foundation of their enterprise architecture. Since 2007, Dirk has been running his own company, SOAPARK, which specialises in strategy consulting in the area of digital transformation and SOA.

Manas K. Deb is currently the Business Head of Cloud Computing at Capgemini/Europe. He is a veteran of the software industry with more than 30 years of experience including deep work in development, product management, architecture, management of transformative customer projects, and sales and marketing. During his career at TIBCO and Oracle, he focused on the whole spectrum of middleware technologies.

Martin Frick is currently COO at Generali Switzerland. He has held executive positions in large multinational corporations, BPO service companies and start-up incubators in international settings, with a focus on IT and operations in financial services. He has been responsible for large-scale business build-up initiatives and turnaround situations in large organisations, always with a strong need for pervasive change management.