Let’s look back four years and remember what consultants predicted for the digitally transformed future of companies. Expectations were high, a bright, technology optimistic future was drawn in vivid colors – self-driving cars, disrupted businesses, AI automates all backoffice processes, etc. etc. And now – let’s compare this to the reality of enterprises of the old economy – yes, companies have run punctual innovation initiatives, banks have modernized their mobile payment apps . But substantially? Nothing has “transformed”! Digital transformation of the old economy is happening at a much slower pace than expected. So, the question is: why? Why are big companies still around without having changed their business models substantially? Read More

In nine out of ten companies I worked as an EA, IT implementation projects were used as the key element used in strategic planning. Boards were used to budget and prioritize goals based on project status reports. They had to decide whether to invest in project ‘ABZ’ or ‘Leo New’ (both quite cryptic names for them) – not the best way to keep oversight over their strategic goals.

The Architectural Thinking Framework includes the concept of “Strategic Fields of Action” (SFAs) (introduced in our last blog post) that addresses this problem. SFAs connect the strategic goals of the company with the implementation projects. Thus, they are the link between the operational planning of projects and the architectural skeleton of the company.   Read More

Defining a compelling vision should usually be the first step to start a digital transformation journey. Your executives craft a vision of your transformed company: what your company will stand for, how it will operate, which technology it will use to improve customer value. That vision highlighted some of the major landmarks on your transformation journey.

Derived from this vision, companies should define strategic goals that bring the vision to a more operational level. Read More

To unleash its enormous power, Enterprise Architecture (EA) must be implemented as a management instrument that is the basis for important strategic decisions. In practice, however, EA is still a mystical discipline, ruled by vague frameworks and done by a small EA group far away from executive boards. In most companies, EA has no or very limited impact on strategic business decisions. Enterprise Architecture SHOULD be a management instrument but fails in practice. Read More

The Architectural Thinking Association® celebrates its first birthday! A lot has happened in this year, and plans are getting clearer and clearer, so – let’s have a look at the results we’ve achieved so far and at our next steps:

We’ve built an interdisciplinary Leadership Team

I am happy that we were able to build an active, multidisciplinary ->Leadership Team. It consists of seven renowned people from the fields of Business Strategy, Business Architecture, Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Design, and Agile Solution Development. In our monthly calls, we discussed our mission, the conceptual foundations of Architectural Thinking, and future steps. Read More

Business agility is at the top of the priority list of CEOs. They want to get quick and agile like a rabbit that can change direction with each jump. This kind of agility, however, can only be achieved by well-designed enterprises that are adaptive to their surroundings. Like an octopus that can change shape and color in an instant.

But how to become a sustainably adaptive enterprise that survives disrupting competitors?

Read More

Since it’s beginning as a discipline, Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) has been performed by a specific “Enterprise Architect” (EA) role. In practice, this role has been far too often reduced to managing the repository of IT applications and drawing fancy, IT-focused diagrams that never reach the reality of solution development. EAM, even after almost four decades, still seems locked in its ivory IT tower with only limited practical influence on strategic business decisions. How many enterprises have been actually architected by EAs?

But why? How comes that EAM fails to do what it is supposed to – architecting enterprises? My answer: Read More

Structure not only increases our chance to success,
it makes us more efficient at it.’ – Marshall Goldsmith

When people discuss digital transformation, they talk mostly about innovation, agility and new technologies. Companies put a tremendous amount of effort into initiatives that should make them more agile and innovative, but most of the companies I know do not manage their innovation initiatives towards a big architectural picture. The overly complex structure of dependencies between innovation- and other projects, and between new technologies and legacy-IT, are not handled with intent. Just present a fancy technology to top-level executives. If it has a low time-to-market and includes AI, chances are high that you can do it. No matter if it’s integration with legacy IT results in unnecessary complexity, ‘technical debt’ that introduces a total cost of ownership that outnumbers the business benefits by far. No matter if it is architecturally sound.

Let’s have a closer look at what ‘architecturally sound’ means, what architecture is all about and why the concept of architecture is helpful, especially in the context of innovation: Read More

The famous parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men, who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, but only one part. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. The complete text of the poem is here.

When I read the parable I instantly found it to be very suitable to use it for companies within the digital transformation. Companies are elephants employing blind men like: Read More

Sustainability, the “ability to exist constantly” (wikipedia) is, for sure, a strength of enterprises of the old economy. Large enterprises have been around for many decades, a proof that they are running a sustainable business.

Nowadays, driven by disruptive forces, agility seams to have overtaken sustainability on the priority ranking of executive management. Boards of directors are aware that to survive in the era of startups their companies must transform in the direction of business agility i.e. to get in a state to “rapidly respond to change by adapting an initial stable configuration” (wikipedia). They invest huge amounts of money in Agile coaches believing that this is the way to improve business agility, but many times those coaches aren’t qualified.  Organizations are looking for easy solutions to becoming agile and there aren’t any.

Having a cursory high-level glance at the two poles sustainability and agility it appears as if…

• agility interferes with the calmer flow of existing sustainable business models. Boating on rough waters into the unknown sea is a risk to sustainable survival. Is agility the enemy of sustainability?
• sustainability interferes with agility – implementing changes in the enterprise design sustainably means to think holistically and harder and thus to invest more time. Is sustainability the enemy of business agility?

No to both questions!

Agility and sustainability complement each other. They interrelate like the famous Chinese yin yang symbol that describes “how seemingly opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another”.

But what does this mean?

1. Without a sustainable continuous strategy, you cannot be agile in the medium term.

The architecture of your enterprise supports an agile business only if it has been designed for change. The building of flexible business&IT solutions that fit together to form a sound business architecture needs commonly used elements and ‘conceptual integrity’. This means that the concepts and structures of the business (capabilities, value streams, products & services, business objects, organizational structures) and IT must play together to form an agile enterprise design that maximizes simplicity, consistency, and thus business agility.

You need to go slower in the short term to become/stay fast in the long term.

2. Without business agility, you cannot sustain…

…because you cannot adapt to changing environments – the startups will take over. The strategies of yesteryear don’t provide sustainability any more.

The secret path to true business agility seems to be to solve this sustainability/agility paradox. To find the right speed for building strategic solutions. To be fast enough to survive in constantly changing times but to take enough time to build sustainable. To balance speed/agility with sustainability.

Solution for this paradox? You must become a sustainably agile enterprise

What you should do to become a sustainably agile enterprise

• Create a lean, business-oriented architectural model of the existing structure of your enterprise collaboratively (involving business & IT people)
• Set up lean governance structures to enable sustainable strategic decisions based on the solid information of this architecture model
• Realizes small innovative minimum viable products (MVP) to evaluate new business opportunities using new technologies
• Once MVPs have proven to create business value: take your time to integrate them properly with your existing business&IT structures

Previous Posts:

AT#20: Why Digital Transformation fails without Architecture

AT#15: How to make decisions in uncertain Times

AT#10: Technical Debt – the ignored Killer of “Agile” Enterprises