The days of EA managers who are not involved closely and directly in the digital transformation of their companies are numbered. Digital transformation has stolen their value proposition. Digital transformation is telling a powerful and compelling story to the leaders of the organization: change is needed now. If EA is truly the bridge between strategy and execution — if it is the key to enabling change — then digital transformation should leverage EA.

How many resilience-rooted architecture principles have you defined and how many of them are honored in your everyday systems development work? The EA practice should evolve with the aim to be more understandable to users, not more complex.

An organization’s business architecture represents the entire scope of what the organization does and the ecosystem in which it operates — at a high level of detail. This makes business architecture uniquely qualified to facilitate collaboration across silos and break them down when appropriate — something that almost no other disciplines or techniques can do. This Advisor shares some examples of why business architecture is so valuable for working across silos.

In the drive to digitize more business processes, the intricacies of how all stakeholders inter­act with data have been underexposed. Though it is understandable that getting a grip on technology and reorganizing your business is hard enough, it is precisely this interaction that will determine your success. If you turn your perspective around, your data architecture will be of more value.

The promise of the big and complicated framework, method, or architecture is our safety. Conformance to norms leads to acceptability in our modern techno-geocentricity: we are the center, we hold the center, nothing else matters, we know all that needs to be known. But are we at an inflection point? On the one hand, we have a world dominated by increasingly complicated frameworks detailing each and every aspect of a “transformation,” be it agile, digital, or other, along with associated architectures. On the other hand, we can contrast this framework approach with alternatives emerging from complex adaptive systems and complexity science. Unfortunately, those alternatives come with the cognitive load associated with uncertainty and ambiguity, and it is this friction that maintains the status quo.

In this on-demand webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Barry M. O’Reilly introduces a new way to model systems in complex environments — residuality theory. You'll explore how residue can be used as an alternative building block when producing systems, enabling designers to consider complex interdependencies without slowing down the design process.

An architecture is designed collaboratively. Architects are also, sometimes, part of the collaborative process. Yes, “also, sometimes, part of.” The collaborative nature of architecture in enterprises is what makes it so challenging, intriguing, and even vexing to those who are entangled in what is a very multidimensional process.

As business architecture gains more and more attention and adoption worldwide, every once in a while it can be useful to lift up, step back, and refresh on a few key concepts.  If you’re new to the discipline, these will help you to accelerate your understanding and navigate the wealth of information available.  If you’re experienced with the discipline, these will help you to ensure alignment with the latest and greatest evolution. This Advisor lays out the top five foundational things you need to know about business architecture.