Defining, designing, implementing, and managing cross-organization collaborations and ecosystems requires a new mindset, solid architecture, and effective end-to-end execution of business direction. Business architecture and business architects are perfectly suited to help with all three.

Data architects need to strike the right balance between addressing data stakeholder pain points and gathering information to build and enhance the data architecture. The triad of people, process, and systems (technology) transforming cohesively are the ingredients for the secret sauce that can provide a practical way of managing the enterprise data architecture. In this Advisor, we examine these influences on data architecture.

We are now well into the depths of dealing with the current situation. In assessing performance in the face of uncertainty, have you identified and inventoried the capabilities, including ones that you barely knew existed within the depths of your enterprise? Can you use this learning to build a more Covidian architecture that will withstand future assaults that could be worse than the one we have been going through?

This Executive Update explores opportunities for strategy execution, the role of business architecture and the resulting benefits, collaboration with other teams, and some steps we can take to move into action.

Unfortunately, most digital transformation initiatives fail not because they lack capabilities or intelligent, talented people but because they lack precise objectives, digital leadership, and an innovative mindset. Goals — such as what the target business outcomes are — must be clearly defined because a digital transformation journey on its own is already a very complicated endeavor. Digital architecture is what simplifies the journey and makes sense of it. It is vital to begin with a clear objective in order to create the right architecture.

The job of the IT strategy isn’t to align to the business strategy. It’s to give the business people who create it as many options to change tack as possible. It’s a provider of IT capability in support of strategic business capabilities. Supporting, enabling, and aligning with core business capabilities equals competitive advantage when the business strategy is a good one.

Enterprises must move away from the old model of centralized decision making to a model of public self-governance. Away from monarchy and toward democracy, giving teams the knowledge and authority to make decisions in the open.

Many organizations today struggle with a strong disconnect between their business model and their IT systems, data distributed over a large number of nonintegrated IT systems, manual interfaces between incompatible applications, or difficulties with EU GDPR compliance. We can trace most, if not all, of these issues back to an abundance of unspecific, inflexible, and non­aligned data models underlying the applications these organizations use to conduct their business. Often, these data models have been developed with insufficient business involvement and in isolation from each other — or have been purchased from vendors with little concern for the actual needs of the organization. In this Advisor, we briefly describe the origins of some of these issues.