Expanding the objectives of enterprise architecture

The objectives of, and demands on, enterprise architecture (EA) are changing rapidly as the importance of technology in driving business value increases. The EA function is a core element of the foundation that both enables and accelerates the tech transformation that companies need in order to compete in a digital-first world. In this kind of modern environment, the objectives of the EA team are threefold.

1. Enable strategic decisions

Setting strategic direction has always been an important EA task, but with many companies becoming increasingly digital, it has become a business-level priority. In the past, major failures affected only the IT budget. Now, they affect the entire business. In a typical retail environment, for example, a major flaw in the overall architecture, such as an integration architecture that doesn’t scale well, would lead to a slight increase in IT costs but only a minor impact on the margin. With a substantial portion of sales moving to online channels, however, the same mistake could cause an outage with substantial lost sales.

Similarly, EA decisions, such as where to establish a shared solution across countries or business units and where not to, can have a direct impact on the business’s strategy and operating model. Take the retail world again. When an enterprise architect decides whether checkout and payment functionality is implemented in two systems—the point-of-sale (POS) terminal and the e-commerce system, for example—or one, it is not only a big investment decision with a $100 million price tag, but it also has a massive effect on the operating model and the company’s ability to realize the corporate vision of becoming an omnichannel retailer.

For these reasons, digitally advanced companies create a plan for the future and engage enterprise architects to figure out a system that can enable it (See Exhibit 2).

2. Ensure reusability

In the past, ensuring reusability was mainly a cost consideration, which meant development was generally treated as a one-off. Pilot functions that were developed and tested quickly often became permanent, but they scaled poorly and led to greater technical debt.

In another case, a retail company implemented an algorithm that calculated the final price after all promotional offers into its e-commerce system. The need to support mobile checkouts, however, then led the retailer to decide to build out this feature a second time. With complex and rapidly changing promotion mechanics, this duplication inevitably led to diverging results and therefore to a bad customer experience when the promotion shown online was not identical to the one in the store. EA plays a crucial role in avoiding such outcomes by ensuring that new solutions reuse established functionality. This not only avoids wasting time on reinventing the wheel but also helps ensure a consistent customer experience. Architects should facilitate the discussion between product teams around features and solutions, make it easy to find all features available for reuse, and ensure close alignment with the strategy.

3. Enable development speed

The flexibility and responsiveness of a digital business are severely hampered if those traits aren’t also reflected in the tech foundation layer. This means that enterprise architects need to manage a consistent technology stack that comes as a “batteries included,” ready-to-use platform for new development teams. EA can deliver on this by providing two things: all the technology components that teams need to develop, deploy, and test new functionalities, and a curated set of “patterns”—best practices on how to store data, integrate with other teams, and perform other common tasks in the everyday life of a product team.