digital transformation: new purpose for enterprise architecture

Copyright © 2015, Intellyx, LLC

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Digital Transformation

New Purpose for Enterprise Architecture

Jason Bloomberg

President

[email protected]

@TheEbizWizard

About Jason Bloomberg

• President of Intellyx

• Advise companies on their digital transformation initiatives & help vendors communicate their agility stories

• Write for Forbes and Wired on Digital Transformation

• Buy my latest book, The Agile Architecture Revolution

Copyright © 2015, Intellyx, LLC2

The Core Business Goal


AgileDigital

Transformation

What is Digital?

Customer preferences & behaviordrive technology choices

Range of technology touchpoints is exploding


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What about Transformation?

Internal organizational change is necessary to maintain focus on the customer in today’s

digital world


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What is Digital Transformation?

• Customer pressures driving technological and organizational change in companies

• Enterprises rethinking:

– How they serve customers

– The role IT plays

– How they build & manage teams

– How they innovate


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The Organizational Challenge

• Every line of business, department, functional area has its own requirements, its own way of doing things

• Must invest in specialized components for narrow purposes

• IT must integrate everything, increasing cost, complexity, & brittleness

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Silos on Top of Silos

• Organizational silos

– Lines of business, departments, geographic locations, etc.

• Application silos

– COTS apps / bespoke apps for different departments

• Infrastructure silos

– Varied data centers & rooms, heterogeneous platforms, & Cloud!


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It’s Time to Take Down the Silos!

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The End-to-End Digital Challenge

• Digital technology begins at the customer touchpoint

• Web & mobile apps include numerous third-party services

– Generally run in cloud

• Apps connect to back end databases & systems of record

– In cloud & on premise


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Democratization of Technology

• People at work have same preferences & behaviors as when they’re at home

• Drives BYOD (Bring-Your-Own-Device)

• Millennials require consumer-centric tech


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Shifting the Center of Gravity

Center of gravity is the IT infrastructure

Center of gravity is the customer


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The Cloud World

The Digital World

What is Agile?

Organizations must capitalize on disruption to achieve greater innovativeness and resilience in the face of digital transformation priorities


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Different Meanings of “Agile”

• “Agile-with-a-capital-A”

–Software development that follows the Agile Manifesto

• General meaning of “agile”

–Business agility as property of an organization


Business Agility

• Responsiveness

– Tactical value

• Resilience

– Risk mitigation

• Innovativeness

– Strategic value


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Ability to respond to change in the business environment and leverage change for competitive advantage

Limitations to Business Agility

• IT as the “bad guy”

• EA buried in the IT department

• Ivory tower architecture

• Silo mentality

– Not invented here

– Can’t wait for IT

– BYOD to BYO-everything

• No Agile Architecture


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Why Agile Software Architecture isn’t Agile

• Agile movement focuses on working software

– Focus on getting the software to meet its requirements

– Get all roadblocks out of the way

• Agile-built software is coded to be fit for purpose


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The Goal of Agile Software

• Requirement to build software that responds to changing requirements

• Inherent flexibility vs. rapid development & deployment


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Extending the Agile Manifesto

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

– As a system of people & technology, the enterprise is more about people

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

– Technology must actually work to enable agility

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

– Slice across the silos

• Responding to change over following a plan

– Architect for change


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Scaling Agile for the Enterprise

• Enterprise Architecture context

– Organization, process, technology, and information

• Legacy context

– Existing applications, middleware, systems of record

• Business focused, iterative, get stuff to work, iconoclastic


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Agile EA & Architecture Frameworks

• Architecture frameworks (TOGAF, Zachman, DoDAF, etc.) do not adequately address business agility

– Difficult to use properly

– Can help achieve baseline or specific business outcomes


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Some of Today’s EA Challenges

• Buried in the IT department

• Insufficient connection to business

• Too focused on artifacts & documentation

• Digital leadership unclear of EA role


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What about Agility?

• Business agility is a metarequirement

• Requirement that requirement change must be supported


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Requirement: Make the Organization More Agile

“Meta” Thinking

• Remember, we’re architecting for change

• Agile architect doesn’t think about the thing, but about how it changes

• Metaprocesses

– Processes for creating, managing, changing processes

• Metapolicies

– Policies for creating, managing, changing policies

– In other words, policies for how to do governance


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Change at the Meta Level

• In fact, your entire architecture subject to change

• We need a meta-architecture: an architecture for building inherently dynamic architectures

• The key to thinking like an Agile Architect!


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Understanding the Business Agility Driver

• Architects must recognize and identify agility drivers

• Stakeholders may or may not identify drivers as such

• Business drivers always connect to bottom line (and mission priority in public sector)


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Architecting Human-Technology Systems

• Architecting technology isn’t enough

• You have to architect the people as well

• Organizational and process layers rightfully part of EA

• Business architecture also focuses on human behavior


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Architecting People?

• Governance: creating, communicating, and enforcing policies

– Apply to both human & technology behavior

– Policy-related processes

• Automated & lightweight

• Focus on important policies

– Security

– Regulatory compliance

– Software interface standards


Not a traditional approach to governance!

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The Center of Digital Excellence

• EA-centric team responsible for end-to-end best practice across digital effort

• De-emphasize “architecture” title

• How about Director of Digital Excellence?


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Let CODE self-organize

New Role for Enterprise Architects

• Leverage data to properly balance optimization and disruption

• Essential for achieving market-leading levels of innovation


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Where’s Our Business Agility?

• Organizations must be responsive, resilient, and innovative

• Business agility is a property of the enterprise

• People and technology can be flexible as well, but we must architect our organizations to be agile


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At the Heart of Agile Architecture

• Think of the enterprise as a system of systems

– Component systems are people and technology systems

• We must architect the organization so entire enterprise exhibits business agility

• We can only engineerbusiness agility via its component systems

• Change is constant & how changes to component systems affect the enterprise is unpredictable


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Continuous Business Transformation

• With Agile EA there is no to-be architecture

– Not in the physical sense

• Instead, the focus of the architecture is expecting and supporting ongoing change by specifying technology that is inherently flexible

• Architects must begin at the Meta layer


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There is no Shortcut!

Remember, Digital Transformation isn’t about the Digital, it’s about the Transformation!


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