The responsibility of a Digital Architect to deliver Digital Transformation Sustainably

“Sustainability” and “Sustainable IT”.

Before figuring out what it means to deliver Digital Transformation Sustainably, what do these above words and phrases really mean?

According to UNESCO, “Sustainability is often thought of as a long-term goal (i.e., a more sustainable world), while sustainable development refers to the many processes and pathways to achieve it.”

Sustainable IT is defined by Capgemini as “Sustainable IT is an umbrella term that describes an environment-focused approach to the design, use, and disposal of computer hardware and software applications and the design of accompanying business processes.

Now I’d argue Digital Architecture and Digital Transformation have always been about delivering sustainable digital solutions (from a technical and business point of view), i.e., making things efficient, effective and enduring, maximising return on investment for the business and, fundamentally, improving the experience for the user so they use digital solutions over the long term.

So then, why should we Digital Architects worry about the word “sustainability” when delivering Digital Transformation?

First, a reflection: What is IT Architecture?

IT Architecture of its various flavours generally follow the fundamentals of:

1.??????Quality - make sure solutions delivered meet business objectives

2.??????Make sure solutions work at the performance levels the client expects

3.??????Integrity, the solution is safe, compliant, secure and risk profile is acceptable

4.??????Sustainable, is it going to evolve, meet the tests of time and deliver the agreed expectations of the client

I think we now have the opportunity (and conversation platform) around sustainability that this can be expanded.

So, what is Sustainable Digital Architecture?

As Digital Architects, we design Digital Solutions by applying methods and techniques combined with our technical expertise, considering the end-to-end solution, end-to-end user journey, and end-to-end lifecycle of the Digital Service covering all aspects of the business, people, information, system, and technology infrastructure.

We should now pay particular attention to the impact on the wider environment our solution designs can make. If we add economic, social, and environmental factors to our User Journey Analysis and Digital Solution Analysis, we can play a huge role in helping digital transformations support various Sustainability agendas.

Adapting a Sustainable IT approach to Digital Transformation.

As digital architects, we can adapt the three-step Sustainable IT process to deliver Sustainable Digital Transformations, adding an additional fourth step to focus on economic, social, and environmental “user personas”, as follows:

1.??????Assess – Set the foundations for the digital transformation with an agreed clear vision and transformation objective, understanding the user journey and create a sustainable service design

2.??????Plan – Create effective governance for a Sustainable Digital Transformation, carrying out a Sustainable Assessment alongside traditional Digital design and prototype activities

3.??????(NEW) Digitally Sustainable Assessment – create and apply economic, social, and environmental user personas to the digital solution, identifying their user needs and resulting design changes to the Digital Architecture as required

4.??????Implement & Run - Operationalise the Digital Transformation sustainably

This approach, in essence, boils down to establishing a Sustainable User Journey to then understand how to deliver that user journey with sustainable technology. This is something that, in my experience, typically gets missed with Digital Transformations, that tend to narrowly focus on individual users or particular user groups and forget the bigger picture of sustainability.

Sustainability is important for the planet, for your business and for your users and customers

Fundamentally I’m not suggesting Digital Architects need to do anything new to what they have always done. Namely, Architects have always had a responsibility for ensuring the completeness (fitness-for-purpose) of the architecture, in terms of adequately addressing all the pertinent concerns of its stakeholders.

What we do need to do differently however is spend more of our energy ensuring our solutions deliver against Sustainability agendas, doing this through creating and analysing user personas covering economic, social, and environmental aspects. We can then successfully make sustainability a core driver of Digital Transformation, cast away its image as a trade-off, and positively help enable a planet that endures for all those that inhabit it, at a reduced cost of delivery and run for the business.

And I strongly believe, as Digital Architects, we now have the opportunity to really embed sustainability principles and actors into designs that achieve value gains and cost savings for the business.