The Silent Struggle: Keeping Current State EA in Sync with Reality

Strategy planning is akin to planning a long journey to a far destination. The most obvious part of this planning is to know where you are starting the journey from, the starting point. This is so trivial in ordinary journey planning that no one explicitly questions it, everyone assumes they all know the starting point. Unfortunately, in business when planning the strategic journey, a very few are aware of the starting point. Yes, shocking but true!

Some of you might already have guessed who everyone might blame for it. Yes, the usual suspects, the enterprise architecture practice. But this time, it actually is true. Okay, before you come to EA’s defense, lets dive a bit into the issue.

One of the key responsibilities of the enterprise architecture practice is to ensure everyone in the business and IT have a clear knowledge of the ‘starting point’ of the strategic planning journey. This is not too obvious at first but let us understand what we mean by the starting point.

Well, the starting point in this case happens to be your good old well-defined current state enterprise architecture and as the name suggests, it must truly be ‘current’ and accurate. Unfortunately, maintaining an accurate and up-to-date current state of enterprise architecture is one of the most challenging activities of EA practices.

One obvious reason for this is that the leaders within business and IT do not realize the importance of maintaining currency and accuracy of the current state representation of the enterprise, as this is not exactly the priority for them. Obviously more attention is given to the future state strategic, operational and tactical changes as that is where the money is spent. No one allocates budget just to maintain the current state. It is assumed by everyone that the EA team will find money and somehow magically make it happen.

But seriously, this is not easy for EA teams to handle even if they had the money. The difficulty stems from the complexity, scale, and dynamism of modern enterprises.

Large enterprises often have a vast array of systems, processes, applications, and data sources that interact in complex ways. Capturing this complexity in a coherent and up-to-date architecture is challenging, especially when there are interdependencies across different business units and geographies.

Businesses are constantly evolving due to market pressures, technological advancements, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory changes, and internal innovation. These changes can and do quickly render parts of the EA outdated, as there never is enough time (and resources) to promptly update EA repositories after the changes are implemented.

Different parts of the organization often own different pieces of the architecture. This fragmented ownership can lead to siloed information, making it difficult to create and maintain a holistic view of the current state.

Keeping the EA up to date requires ongoing effort and resources, which is not prioritized, especially when the value of EA is not fully recognized by the leaders within IT and business at large.

The reality is that it takes enormous manual efforts to update current state architecture to capture every aspect of the enterprise accurately that are close to reality. Minimizing these manual efforts should be the highest priority of the EA leaders but seldom they even make mention of this important issue, as no one really cares to recognize the value of doing so. EA teams maintaining complex architectures manually using very rudimentary and inefficient tools is so illogical, however, unfortunately it is very prevalent in most organizations. Its like a professional plumber walking into your kitchen to fix your sink with just a hammer.

Many organizations lack integrated tools and platforms to efficiently capture, store, and update architectural data. Disparate systems and manual processes can make it difficult to maintain a consistent and accurate current state.

As mentioned earlier one must know the starting point of the journey. Without knowing where you are starting from one cannot chart the journey to the destination.

An accurate current state Enterprise architecture is the starting point and it provides a solid foundation for strategic planning. It allows leaders to understand the existing capabilities, identify gaps, and make informed decisions about future investments and transformations.

Understanding the current state is crucial for identifying potential risks and dependencies. This knowledge helps in mitigating risks associated with changes, ensuring that the enterprise can adapt without unexpected disruptions.

Accurate current state EA enables better resource allocation and process optimization. By knowing what assets and capabilities exist, the organization can avoid redundant investments and streamline operations.

Accurate representation of the current state is essential for ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and internal governance standards. It helps in tracking changes and ensuring that they align with the organization's policies and goals.

Okay, so what can be done about this very serious but oftentimes unacknowledged problem?

Here a few suggestions for Enterprise Architecture leaders to ensure not only they themselves are cognizant of this problem, but they are actively involved in creating awareness of this issue among their business and IT peers.

The EA leaders must encourage collaboration across business units and IT teams to ensure that all changes are communicated and reflected in the EA. Establish clear roles and responsibilities for updating and maintaining the architecture.

They should define and enforce governance processes that ensure all architectural changes are reviewed, approved, and documented. This includes setting up an architecture review board and establishing change management procedures.

They should ensure that the EA practice is tightly aligned with the organization’s strategic goals. This alignment makes it easier to justify the resources needed to keep the architecture up to date and relevant.

Rather than trying to capture the entire architecture in one go, they should consider adopting an incremental approach to updates. Focus on key areas of change and gradually expand the scope, ensuring that critical components are always current. And conduct regular audits and reviews of the current state EA to identify areas that may be outdated or incorrect and use these reviews to make necessary updates and improvements.

However, in my view one of the most important point the EA leaders often overlook is implementing a good tool that can continuously discover the real-time changes in the enterprise architecture. This can be achieved by integrating monitoring tools and automated data collection systems that feed into the EA tool/repository. They should leverage modern EA tools that offer integrated capabilities for data management, visualization, and analysis and support real-time updates, collaboration, and automated reporting.

Investing in an integrated Enterprise Architecture (EA) tool is a strategic move that can significantly reduce the time and effort required to keep the current state architecture up to date. The right tool, especially when enhanced with AI capabilities, can automate many of the manual processes involved in EA management and provide real-time insights into the enterprise’s architecture.

There are many EA tools out there, some good and others not so much, but in my view, none of them truly can help eliminate the time-consuming manual efforts involved in maintaining current state enterprise architecture.

A perfect EA tool that can automatically discover and update the EA architecture data entities with very little manual interventions and is able to generate various architecture diagrams under business, application, data, and infrastructure domains automatically, will certainly be a great boon to all EAs.

The idea of a "perfect" EA tool is an ambitious but increasingly achievable, especially with advancements in AI, machine learning, and data integration technologies. But here are some thoughts on how such a tool could be brought to life.

First, the tool must support a comprehensive EA metamodel that defines the business, application, data, and infrastructure domains. This metamodel should be flexible enough to accommodate various industries and business-specific requirements and should be easily extensible to adapt to changes over time. Leveraging industry standards like TOGAF, ArchiMate, or custom frameworks that align with the organization’s needs can provide a solid foundation for the metamodel.

The tool should have built-in discovery mechanisms that automatically scan and identify business processes, applications, data sources, and infrastructure components across the organization. This can be achieved through APIs, network scans, system logs, and direct integration with operational systems like ERP, CRM, and CMDBs.

The tool should aggregate data from multiple sources, federating it into a unified view without requiring manual data entry. It should support integrations with existing tools and platforms (e.g., cloud providers, ITSM tools) to pull data seamlessly.

Continuous monitoring and real-time updates should be a core feature, ensuring that the EA reflects the current state as changes happen in the business and technology landscape.

Certainly, AI can be used to identify patterns and detect anomalies across the architecture, suggesting optimizations, flagging potential risks, and predicting the impact of changes. NLP capabilities can interpret unstructured data like emails, meeting notes, or strategy documents, extracting relevant architectural insights and automatically integrating them into the EA.

The tool should automatically be able to generate architecture diagrams and views based on the metamodel, dynamically updating these as the underlying data changes. In my view this will be the most impactful feature that will tremendously reduce architecture creation time and maintenance efforts. AI can also suggest different views or lenses based on the stakeholder’s needs (e.g., business vs. technical views). The ability to generate and customize views for different stakeholders, such as business executives, IT managers, or compliance officers, ensuring that each group sees the information most relevant to them.

The tool should automatically check the architecture against internal policies and external regulations, alerting the EA team to any deviations or potential compliance risks. Governance processes should be automated, with role-based access control ensuring that only authorized individuals can make changes, while others can view or comment on the architecture.

Real-time, interactive dashboards should be available in the tool that provide a 360-degree view of the business and technology landscape, allowing stakeholders to drill down into specific areas of interest.

Also, it would be a great help if integration with DevOps pipelines is possible to ensure that any changes made during development are automatically reflected in the EA. Agile practices can be supported by dynamically updating the architecture content (and metamodel) as new features are developed and deployed.

Continuous feedback from operations, including performance data and user feedback, can be integrated back into the EA to refine and optimize the architecture.

An integrated EA tool with advanced automation and AI capabilities can significantly enhance the efficiency and accuracy of maintaining the current state architecture. By automating discovery, monitoring, and reporting processes, and leveraging AI for predictive analysis, optimization, and compliance, lead enterprise architects can ensure that their architecture reflects the true state of the enterprise. This not only will improve strategic planning but also enable the organization to adapt swiftly to change and maintain a competitive edge.

This will help put an end to the silent struggles of all EAs of keeping the current state enterprise architecture truly current.

Author: Sunil Rananavare, IT Strategy Planning and Architecture (CIO Advisory)

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The views in the article are author’s own and not necessarily of his employer.