Technology, Design, Architecture
A Modern Enterprise Architecture Approach
Transform the enterprise with Mobility, Cloud, IoT & Big Data
In this article, I want to introduce one of my recent books which aimed to fill a gap in the Enterprise Architecture discipline. This article includes a brief overview of the book depicting my reasons to author it and my views on current enterprise organizations.
The purpose of the book
My purpose in authoring this book was to provide essential guidance, compelling ideas, and unique ways to Enterprise Architects to successfully perform complex enterprise modernization initiatives transforming them from chaos to coherence.
This is not a theory book describing Enterprise Architecture in detail. There are myriad books on the market and in libraries discussing details of enterprise architecture.
These resources are all valuable and serve different purposes. My aim in this book is to highlight key success factors for Enterprise Architects and reflect on lessons learned from the field, especially in the enterprise modernization and digital transformation context.
As a practicing Enterprise Architect, myself, I read hundreds of enterprise architecture books, articles, conference proceedings, and academic papers to learn different viewpoints. Those resources have been valuable to me to establish my foundations in the earlier phase of my profession.
However, what is missing now is a concise practical book showing Enterprise Architects the novel approaches, insights from real-life experience, agile experimentation, design thinking practice, and pointing out the differentiating technologies which are critical for enterprise modernization and digital transformation initiatives.
If only there were such a guide when I started engaging in modernization and digital transformation programs.
My biggest lesson learned was related to the business outcome of enterprise modernization and digital transformation initiatives. What genuinely mattered for business was the return on investment of the enterprise architecture and its monetizing capabilities.
The rest is considered as the theory because nowadays, sponsoring business executives, in this economic climate, have no interest, attention, or tolerance for non-profitable ventures.
I am sorry for disappointing some idealistic Enterprise Architects in this book, but with due respect, it is the reality, and we cannot change it. In this book, I wanted to deal with reality rather than theoretical perfection. As one of my sponsoring executives asserted, “anyone against this view in this climate must be coming from another planet”.
In this concise, uncluttered, and easy-to-read book, I attempt to show significant pain points, critical use cases, innovative plans, collaborative intelligence, and other valuable business considerations for enterprise modernization and digital transformation initiatives using a structured approach.
The architectural rigor is still essential. We cannot compromise the rigor aiming to the quality of products and services as a target outcome. However, there must be a delicate balance among architectural rigor, business value, and speed to market.
I applied this pragmatic approach to multiple substantial digital transformation initiatives and complex modernization programs. The key point is using an incrementally progressing iterative approach to every aspect of modernization initiatives, including people, processes, tools, and technologies as a whole.
Starting with a high-level overview of enterprise architecture aiming to set the context, I provided a dozen of distinct chapters to point out and elaborate on the factors which can make a real difference in dealing with complexity and producing excellent modernization initiatives.
As eminent leaders, Enterprise Architects are the critical talents who can undertake this massive mission using their people and technology skills, in addition to many critical attributes such as calm and composed approach in most difficult situations.
I strongly point out that Enterprise Architects are architects, not firefighters in difficult situations of digital transformation. Witnessing the firefighting Enterprise Architects is, unfortunately, a common case in many large business organizations. My aim is to contribute to changing this undesirable situation.
I have full confidence that this book can provide valuable insights and aha moments for these talented architects to tackle this enormous business mission turning chaos into coherence in modern enterprises.
Lessons Learned from my Background
I have been practicing enterprise architecture for over two decades globally. Large business organizations are substantially challenged with rapid change in technology domains, new rules and regulations, and increasing demands of consumers.
Every large organization that I worked for had digital transformation and modernization programs to some extent at the enterprise level. I witnessed several failed initiatives caused by multiple factors, some were in their control and some beyond their control.
As an experienced Enterprise Architect, I emphasized the criticality of effective Viability Assessment as one of the key success factors to deal with enterprise risks, issues, and dependencies.
One of the major causes of the failure was difficulty in dealing with complexity. Enterprises have multiple dimensions spanning many domains. These domains are tightly interrelated; hence, a minor issue with one domain can be reflected in many others.
For example, in a typical large organization, just strategy and planning phase took over a year while hundreds of highly paid employees were churning and debating the ideas extensively. Once the program finally reached a consensus on the scope and approached the requirements management phase, the entire budget for the program was consumed.
This specific business organization had to make all those talented people redundant. This typical and unfortunate example was a valuable lesson learned on how important to approach modernization iteratively rather than trying to perfect everything upfront.
In hindsight, they could have set the strategy at a high level for a single domain and only planned one aspect of the strategy in the selected domain, tested it with the allocated budget, and produced some desirable results.
The other reasons for failure were too much focus on technologies that were challenging to implement enterprise-wide due to prohibitive cost, lack of required functionality, and capabilities perspectives.
For example, while a business organization could have started testing the Cloud with a cheap public Cloud offering and moved their workloads iteratively, they were trying to build a full-fledged private Cloud platform with many emerging technologies and expensive gear.
The hidden cost in such a monolithic approach, unfortunately, destroyed all good intentions.
There were many more similar lessons learned from failure.
Therefore, I wanted to share my experience with how these deadly errors could be prevented with a different mindset, novel approach, an innovative structure, and with use of supportive tools and empowering technologies as emphasized in the book.
The book is available in digital and paperback formats.
Chapters of the book on Medium
Introduction Chapter
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Writer Bio
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