Enterprise a?r?c?h?i?t?e?c?t?u?r?e? design

Architecture sounds difficult and enterprise sounds as boring. Besides not true, these terms might therefore not the best ones to make an increasingly important practice more attractive, allowing enterprise architecture to mature further and creating a more positive business impact.

An enterprise architect has to be an artist and jack of all trades, EA being far from a boring profession: it requires skills related to creativity, leadership, management, storytelling, stand-up technology advisory, communicating, convincing and negotiating, organizational change, moderation, inventing, predicting, and decisionmaking: all and even more of these arts have to be on the palette of a value-adding enterprise architect.

With such a diversity of competencies, an EA's profession should actually be very attractive and appealing, the hottest job ever, and the inspiration and impact of EA should stimulate the 'business' to use the power of EA all along the business planning lifecycle.

The reality is that EA makes people think more about frameworks, theories, and complexity more than about a strategic design discipline.

What could happen if we started to see EA completely differently, as a holistic and strategic design craft? Perhaps this could solve a number of problems.

Good design, as a practice and profession, always consists of some very specific parts, that together build the generally accepted strong fundaments of 'good design'.

This fundament, and a core definition in general, have been lacking for EA mostly so far and adding these as cornerstones to the fundaments of the EA profession, looking at it as a design practice, would make the profession more clear, more applicable-in-business and more attractive to explore and mature further.

In good design, one finds back:

- A meta definition of design. Don Norman made a very good description of the principles of good design.

- A set of design principles. Design principles are fundamental pieces of advice for you to make easy-to-use, pleasurable artifacts. When one applies them, one can predict how users will likely react to your design. “KISS” (“Keep It Stupidly Simple”) is an example of a principle where you design for non-experts and therefore minimize any confusion your users may experience.

- A design system that contains meaningful design components - a named, determined choice of building blocks that one can use - let's say, the designer's tool kit. Design systems are often tailormade but are mostly based on general principles and best practices.

- A practical design process that tells one exactly how to apply design in a human-centric fashion and how to achieve results successfully. Also here, a design process can be adapted to specific wishes and needs, but it is usually based on a generally accepted foundation.

- Design accelerators: examples, use cases, and blueprints, and other forms of content that help to speed up the design work.

To use an analogy, we could look at UX and web design. Think about the material design framework delivered by Google as an example of a design system, supported by design principles, which you can apply in practice using for instance design thinking from IDEO as a design method, and preformatted templates built with Google (light) material design as design accelerators.

By applying the design cornerstones to EA, EA could become a more valuable, practical, accelerated, bootstrapped, result-oriented, and even more important, a user-centric discipline, with the aim of creating value. This is what we could call 'enterprise design'.

Imagine enterprise design, a best of breed of design and architecture, allowing to still serve the original purpose of EA - aligning business and IT - and still enabling to ship the deliverables that EA conventionally is delivering, but not bound anymore to the somewhat 'heavy' frame that the 'architecture definition' carries along, not bound to merely the 'IT-space', and with a broad, holistic focus on users-of-enterprise-ecosystems.

Enterprise design, or 'applying design in business' in general, is very much needed in these times of digital, always-on, and disruptive business models. It is very much needed because many (conventional) companies are still run by ratio, are not user-centric, don't think nor plan holistically, and are losing markets as a consequence. Many companies still put their most emphasis on control, risk avoidance, and efficiency improvement. This usually results in gigantic amounts of project plans, roadmaps, business cases, and plentitudes of agile teams to deliver (often unclear) targets related to further streamlining, shrinking, and simplifying the business–but are not adding value or supporting growth.

"Doing more for less" is the overarching theme here, often with an inside-out focus on processes, procedures, and functions, looking at the company from an inside-out perspective only, and with very little attention to the users. Customers, employees, business partners, and all other people and groups who have anything to do with the company are often only discussed later (or not at all - often people look surprised when you ask how that CRM rollout of 1.5 million $ is now actually bringing value for the customer).

So it comes as no surprise that many companies are struggling to stay alive in this digital age where consumers no longer choose a product simply because of the best price-quality ratio or product availability but chose by brand power, availability and ease-of-access, connectivity, and experience. Efficiency-focused approaches no longer yield. It's not just about process efficiency anymore. The best way to sell a product now is actually by no longer selling the product, but everything that's around it. And yet, many companies are stubbornly moving forward with the rational, logical approach (or, as Einstein said, are doing the same things, but expecting different results, which can be a sign of madness)–the stuff we learn still at MBAs.

Creating premium, integrated user experiences and building customer loyalty are the aspects that matter today. To achieve that, you need an integrated, holistic approach to consciously and holistically conceive, plan, create, and scale products, services, and experiences that people love.

That means blending online and offline capabilities together and trying to burst through organizational silos. Innovation, planning, go-to-market, sales, operating the company; everything must be brought seamlessly together and be looked at from the user and consumer perspective and then improved as a whole (as one system) in order to grow the business by creating user value, and consistently be organized around the topic of becoming more relevant.

What sets successful companies apart today is their ability to create products, services, and experiences that are built entirely for and around the consumer (user), and take user feedback as the driving force behind inventing alternative business models. In addition, these types of companies pay a lot of attention to building a strong internal engine, a smooth process, because they know that great customer experiences must go hand in hand with an efficient and smooth business operation - to constantly optimize the business flow and make the business scale again and again. They can do that because they look at their business holistically, as one, integrated system. What characterizes modern, successful companies is how they use design-driven methods to operate holistically–and go all-in to create user value. They believe that holistic design helps to build better, user-centric businesses that are able to deliver amazing experiences at any point throughout the consumer journey and lifecycle.

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In the past we wrote some articles that could be relevant for you if you are interested in enterprise design and want to know more:

• An enterprise design manifesto
• An attempt to define a design-driven process for EA
• An article trying to explain the difference between architecture and design
• An article on why it's important to use enough detail in architecture - don't fear the details - people want to hear them

This article was published earlier on LinkedIn. Subscribe to Autom8 to receive more digital transformation insights like this.