Adaptive Enterprise
In our ongoing series on high-speed organizations and the Adaptive Enterprise, we have written several times about the need to foster innovation in your organization. So how can enterprise architects contribute to that innovation?
Enterprise architecture done well holds terrific benefits for organizations dealing with the challenges of an increasingly digital world. All enterprise architecture initiatives are not created equal, however. While some grow and develop into important business success enablers, others may simply flounder after a while.
-Fabian Aulkemeier & Marc Lankhorst
In our previous blog post, we outlined why Enterprise Architecture and Agile/DevOps are key in becoming an adaptive enterprise. We also described several use cases where EA can strengthen Agile and DevOps practices. Now, we want to focus on the ways in which you can connect these in practice, using architecture models and appropriate tool support.
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In today’s business landscape, effective transformation is critical for enterprises to stay competitive. By definition, transformation happens over time.
Enterprises (or some subsection thereof) have a current state which needs to change for the better. That change – however small or large – results in a different future state. With the widespread adoption of Agile working practices and DevOps-based continuous delivery, these changes can be very small and very frequent.
In the first blog of this series, I explained how important it is to raise your digital change capability to become an adaptive enterprise. I also highlighted the role of effective communication, as well as approaches to categorize and visualize enterprise architecture descriptions based on the TOGAF and ArchiMate standards. In this series, I also included guidance on which approach to select for modeling Architecture and Solution Building Blocks (both are types of logical or physical components). To round out this series, I will end by discussing the connection to Deployed Solutions.
Previously, I wrote about the need to digitize change capabilities and how enterprise architecture can support and provide value to your organization. I also discussed how to categorize architecture descriptions along different levels of abstraction. But there is one dimension I didn’t dive into: How generic or specific is the architecture description compared to your organization?
Over the past decade, reference architectures have been developed and many have been published. They are a very useful start describing an enterprise, and the architectures are more or less specific to our enterprise. I don’t want to lose myself in academic discussions about what should be classified as what, so I will focus on the big points of the idea behind. Read more
Adaptive Enterprise – We are currently living in an interesting time. The digitization of all business capabilities has reached a new level and has had a huge impact on virtually every industry. Business models are being redefined and new companies have emerged to become global players. Today, companies must be more agile than ever before and the speed of change will only continue to increase.
In modern enterprises, change is no longer a simple, top-down affair. All levels of the organization need to be involved, and everyone from shop-floor employees to the CEO need to work on local improvements to business processes. Lean projects and agile product development teams must rapidly innovate digital environments, strategists need to invent and experiment with new business models, project and program portfolio managers have to decide on investment allocations, and those responsible for domains like risk management and regulatory compliance have to do their part. This “all hands on deck” approach requires enterprise-wide transparency and visibility of plans, structures, opportunities and constraints.
Defining a good strategy is difficult, especially in this rapidly moving digital world. But realizing your strategy is even more complicated. After all, how do you ensure a strategy is implemented in a coordinated, coherent way? How do you manage all of the moving parts?
Adaptive Enterprise – 2018 will be either an exciting or a terrifying year for many organizations. Which one will depend entirely on each organization’s ability to change. “Adapt or Die” is the mantra we must hold true today, and because the rate and magnitude of market disruptions are greater than ever before, we need to change the way we change.
– By Marc Lankhorst and Fabian Aulkemeier
An enterprise architecture model, or any other model in your business design practice, contains input from numerous actors within your organization. Your architecture’s governance must continuously collect that input, validate its accuracy and retain a record of all interventions to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, architecture principles, technology standards and other constraints.
The effective use of digital technologies is paramount in a competitive environment. To succeed, you don’t need a separate digital strategy; you need a business strategy for the digital age. But digital transformation is difficult to manage because it requires you to change many moving parts of your enterprise, much like redesigning and rebuilding an airplane while in flight.
In today’s turbulent business environment, organizations need to be excellent at designing and implementing change. The ‘Digital Enterprise’ requires continuous innovation, which means that organizations are in a constant state of flux. At the same time, they need to stay in control. They have to deal with regulatory pressure, financial constraints, and the risk of disturbing their going concern while implementing major change.
I am very excited to announce the new version of Enterprise Studio and an all new Web Portal. This release includes many new capabilities making our software suite more powerful than ever. Next to our excellent modeling, repository and analysis capabilities (top in the market according to Gartner*), our software suite now includes a state-of-the-art Portal. The visualization, analysis and collaboration capabilities enable a much wider range of stakeholders to gain insights across the enterprise, covering a broad range of transformation stakeholders. We proudly name our Portal HoriZZon. Read more
Few companies have a systematic and reliable way of translating their business strategy into action across all relevant parts of the organization. Research on digital transformations by MIT Sloan [1] distinguishes between the ‘what’ (what does an organization want to achieve) and the ‘how’ Read more
Since the release of ArchiMate 3.0 last June, my colleagues and I have written a series of blog posts about combining ArchiMate with other standards, methods and modeling techniques. This post summarizes what we have shown you.
In the past, my colleagues and I have written several blogs on the combination of enterprise architecture and agile ways of working (e.g. Enterprise Architecture and Agile Development: Opposites Attract?, Enterprise Architecture and Innovation: A cultural change, Escaping the Jaws of the Project Monster). In this blog, I want to focus in more detail on the use of the ArchiMate language in the context of agile methods, in particular the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Read more
Organizations have always had to adapt in order to stay relevant, but in today’s fast-paced market, change is more necessary than ever. The ‘Digital Enterprise’ requires major business transformations, delivered at speed. The ‘unfreeze-change-refreeze’ model, reasoning from a stable current to a desired future state, no longer applies. Read more
Organizations have always had to adapt to change in order to stay relevant. But in today’s fast-paced market, change is more necessary than ever. In a recent survey we found that over 60% of C-level management thinks that changing the business model is the main driver for business transformations. Read more
In a recent article by McKinsey, they eloquently argued the importance of enterprise architecture for digital transformations. But they also provide some important criticism of the state of practice. To be really effective at supporting digital transformations, many enterprise architecture practices need to change their behavior.