Staying relevant has become the biggest challenge for CIOs and business leaders alike. No longer can organizations simply rely on past glories to attract customers. If someone is doing it faster, quicker, and better, today’s “always-on” consumers will switch allegiance. A fragmented organization with opaque processes is slow, unresponsive, and unable to guarantee quality; teams spend more time firefighting than innovating, while agile startups are eating away at the customer base.
Despite its inevitability, change also bring unpredictability, and for the established organization, dropping everything and switching tact depending on fickle trends is simply not viable. Instead, it must find a way to incorporate potentially unknown advances into its roadmaps. But for sprawling companies whose teams span not just different offices, but different countries, cultures, and technologies, such alignment can be tricky.
Therefore, the modern enterprise needs a digital strategy which brings the speed, quality and flexibility to respond to market changes and customer demands. An effective EA initiative will give you the confidence of delivering just this, providing a holistic framework from which you model the entire organization and make informed strategy decisions in near real-time.
Indeed, in the digital age, guesswork and estimation are no longer sufficient. Precision and efficiency are the name of the game and this requires visibility, as well as detailed metrics and analytics. EA helps you drill down into each aspect of the business, infrastructure and technology, but more than that, it provides transparency and opportunity to understand the vast array of complex relationships that currently exist, providing a clear picture of the implications of any changes, as well as effective analysis of their success.
However, there are a number of hurdles to overcome on your journey to this end state. It might be that the organization is suffering from a lack of direction or that future initiatives are ill-defined. Alternatively, the company may already be so fragmented that teams become isolated, distrusting of the impending changes. It may even be tooling that is holding you back – if the enterprise is trying to manage itself with incapable tools, not only do they prevent enterprise architecture objective from being realized, but become an active roadblock.
Your Enterprise Architecture Blueprint
With this in mind, we’ve created the enterprise architecture blueprint, which is designed to ensure you can navigate the path away from a jungle of murky processes towards becoming a fast, efficient and responsive organization. We’ve mapped out five levels of enterprise architecture maturity that you can follow all the way from embryonic to exemplary.
The enterprise architecture blueprint will also look at the benefits you can expect upon establishing an EA practice and how to harness them. Given EA is not a fixed state of being – it is an ongoing process that needs to be continually reviewed and monitored – the guide also looks at how you can maintain best practices. By tracking and monitoring everything from ideation to execution, you can understand the implication of introducing technical advances into the organization and use them as a platform for innovation. Find out more about how you can ensure a new digital directive is not something to fear, but can be embraced and capitalized on here.