What drives the success of top Enterprise Architecture teams?
Sep 10, 2024
Earlier this year, Bizzdesign released the State of Enterprise Architecture 2024 report, quickly becoming a definitive source for industry insights. This comprehensive research, based on a survey of over 500 Enterprise and Solution Architects worldwide, provides an in-depth look into our field’s current trends and practices.
Our enterprise architecture research report aimed to assess the maturity and impact of practices across organizations. By analyzing the findings, we could identify critical factors contributing to the success of enterprise architecture practices, which we’ll explore in this blog.
First, I’d like to share the methodology used to compile the findings. To gather the data, we surveyed 500 enterprise architecture professionals from different industries and company sizes globally to get a well-rounded perspective.
The report utilized self-assessment scores from respondents to evaluate various aspects of their enterprise architecture practices. In our survey, we asked architects to do a self-assessment of their team’s maturity, agreeing or disagreeing with seven statements describing a mature practice:
Using these self-assessment answers, we divided the respondents into quartiles based on their self-assessed enterprise architecture maturity scores. The ‘Leaders’ were defined as the top 25% (top quartile) of respondents, while the ‘Laggards; were defined as the bottom 25% (bottom quartile) of respondents.
The analysis revealed a staggering 5.8 times maturity gap between the top quartile Leaders and the bottom quartile Laggards. This allowed us to compare the achievements and performance of the Leaders and Laggards across various metrics, including organizational agility, stakeholder engagement, and confidence in delivering IT and strategic business benefits.
Comparing these Leaders and Laggards leads to some interesting conclusions about the success factors of top teams. Here they are…
Our survey’s results on business outcomes reveal that organizations with mature enterprise architecture practices are more effective in achieving their business objectives. This demonstrates how mature practices are more likely to contribute to organizational success.
The graph below shows that top-performing practices support their organization’s business outcomes. On average, 59% of the Leaders agree that their enterprise architecture program supports these business outcomes, but only 11% of the Laggards.
Which of these business outcomes does your EA program currently support
Additionally, findings in our report reveal that organizations with mature practices enjoy significant advantages compared to the Laggards, such as:
In our survey, we asked respondents to rate various stakeholder groups on their levels of engagement, ranging from not engaged to decreasing, steady, or increasing. The graph below illustrates the average engagement levels for both Leaders and Laggards across all stakeholder groups.
Engagement averaged over Stakeholder Groups
The results reveal a significant contrast: Leaders report increasing engagement with 38% of their stakeholders, while laggards only see this level of engagement with 20% of their stakeholders. This means leaders are nearly twice as successful in enhancing stakeholder engagement.
More strikingly, 41% of Laggards stakeholders show no or declining engagement, compared to just 15% for leaders—indicating that laggards experience 2.7 times more disengagement. Losing stakeholder engagement can severely impact support and even jeopardize your position.
To improve and maintain stakeholder engagement, your practice must focus on delivering value outcomes to their stakeholders. Our report and my previous blog explore various business outcomes that Enterprise Architecture can support, providing insights into how you can effectively engage and retain stakeholder support.
The report emphasizes that organizations using advanced Enterprise Architecture Management Tools tools are more capable of managing change. This suggests that these tools provide better visibility and control over the enterprise architecture landscape, allowing for more strategic and informed decision-making during transformation initiatives.
These tools also support governed, collaborative design, enable architects to adhere to industry standards, and they’re utilized for their powerful analysis capabilities.
There is a strong correlation between maturity and business agility. Organizations with more mature practices demonstrate significantly higher business agility levels than those with less mature practices. This correlation is evident in several aspects:
Leaders are better positioned to anticipate change and more likely to outpace competitors in implementing changes. Since the speed of change in many sectors keeps increasing, this is the key driver for improving the architecture maturity in many organizations. Architects can reduce complexity and pave the way for rolling out changes more quickly, effectively and efficiently.
Successful teams help their organizations prioritize and align IT investments in accordance with their business strategy. In the graph below, we took one of the seven statements from the maturity self-assessment: “Our Enterprise Architecture helps align IT investments with a long-term strategy to reduce risk and deliver business value outcomes”. We correlated that with the increase or decrease in enterprise architecture budgets.
Our EA helps align IT investments with long-term strategy to reduce risk and deliver business value outcomes
The graph clearly shows that enterprise architecture teams with increasing budgets deliver greater business value by effectively aligning IT investments with organizational strategy. On the other hand, teams that fail to demonstrate business value experience budget reductions. As an architect, you risk jeopardizing your role and job security if you don’t contribute enough value to the organization.
Now that you have the success factors of the top practice we’ve discussed in this blog, your next steps will be to benchmark your practice. Doing this lets you set improvement goals and develop strategies to enhance your enterprise architecture maturity and effectiveness.
How to benchmark your enterprise architecture practice
By comparing your organization’s performance in these areas to the statistics provided in the report, you can identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement in your practice. Knowledge is power. Don’t delay, get started today!
Marc Lankhorst
Managing Consultant & Chief Technology Evangelist at Bizzdesign
Marc contributes to Bizzdesign’s vision, market development, consulting, and coaching on digital business design and enterprise architecture. He also spreads the word on the Open Group’s ArchiMate® standard for enterprise architecture modeling, of which he has been managing the development. His expertise and interests range from enterprise and IT architecture to business process management.
