Throughout my IT career, there has always been a natural tension between:
- Technology – Rapidly changing, and creating better and more capabilities capable of improving business, and
- Businesses and Organisations – Attempting, and quite often failing, to exploit fully the potential benefits offered by those capabilities.
IT-led change hasn’t really changed. Since the 1970s, the influence of computing (as we called it then) on how we do business, as well as the change required to exploit that influence, has fostered efforts to manage this tension by creating delivery methodologies aimed at shining a light on the broader impacts of any change.
The early efforts by the US government to implement standards for computer-led change ultimately created the practice of Enterprise Architecture. This made sense. It combined technology, business, and information in an ideal mix to optimise investment in change, clarify the extent of management needed, and reduce the risk in transformational change.
Architecting the Enterprise
The Open Group Architecture Framework, aka TOGAF, embodies that breadth of disciplines, standing as a “north star” of Enterprise Architecture. The framework explicitly addresses four key aspects: Technology, Applications, Data, and Business activities, before drawing together recommendations for improvements.
Whilst technology has advanced in leaps and bounds, the real challenge of making change effective remains the same. What has changed for us is that the organisational and business changes themselves are increasingly growing larger in impact, cost, and the need to manage the complexity of that change.
Change never stops
The balance offered by Enterprise Architecture methodologies is increasingly challenged by the rapid pace of technology change. The challenge facing any organisation is whether it can adopt and exploit the technology. After all, no one wants change for change’s sake.
Over time, increasing computer power delivered at lower costs has lowered barriers to viable use of technology and encouraged new ways to automate business processes. Despite this, the danger remains that the expected benefits will not fully materialise if the balance of other required changes to business practice and the use of information is not fully addressed when implementing technology change.
The Enterprise Architecture influence
Organisationally, technology investments tend to be most visible through their impact on people and financial needs, whereas data (or information) and business changes can get overlooked or discounted in importance. There are innumerable examples of the belief that some new technology will solve a problem, when the truth is that wider changes are required to make it fully work.
The nature of Business Architecture is to build an understanding of how an organisation works, with technology as part of the mix. Given this breadth of understanding, a good business architecture evidences potential change impacts and provides support for advocating impactful changes to organisational operations.
A new realm of digitalisation
As technology has continued to advance in capability, we have now entered the realm of digitalisation. Where previously technology has largely held the ability to automate how we do business, modern leaps in capability offer transformational possibilities.
You can call it “digitalisation” or “digital transformation”. Either way, we now see two drivers, often in combination:
- New technology is enabling fundamental and highly impactful changes to business practices.
- Requirements to make large changes to business practices, pulling through technology changes.
I think of how I interact with my GP surgery as a reminder of the power of digitalisation, from the apps I use on my phone to how clinical processes have changed dramatically, enabling me to access healthcare services much more directly and quickly. This is a combination of technology and business transformation in action.
Business Architecture. At the centre of transformational thinking
Whether it is “Technology Up” or “Business Down”, these transformational effects require a detailed level of understanding of how organisations run. And how to show the scale and impact of potential change. This elevates Business Architecture from being one component in a larger framework to now operating squarely at the centre of transformational thinking.
In response, we see emerging initiatives from standards bodies such as the Open Group to formalise this new need for a developed understanding of how technology and business jointly interact and can be changed to create transformational opportunities. Echoing that “Business Down” model, the Business Architecture Guild has recently called for members to comment on establishing a technology or IT framework as an adjunct to the Business Architecture focus.
These initiatives, named “Business Technology Architecture”, reflect this equality in the need for balanced approaches combining business and technology. This means that technology resources increasingly have to be cognisant of business impacts and that business architects have to include technology understanding in their practice.
Contrary to the impression given by technology advances, such as the recent momentum gained behind AI, Business Architecture is no longer only about the business. Instead, it is growingly tech-savvy and becoming the cornerstone of technology-led change.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the author. If you have a question for Russell, please get in touch.
