LeanIX Blog – we love IT Architecture!

Previously, IT played a more of a supporting role; swooping in to save team members when they were locked out of their accounts or fine-tuning network access protocols. This is changing. A recent McKinsey survey revealed that many executives expect IT to play a more integrated role in driving business results. Roughly 80 percent or respondents say that business and technology should collaborate on digital strategy in the future. Going forward, IT leaders will have a leading position in shaping the future decisions of a company.

A recent study by 451 Research reveals that over half of companies currently have an IT transformation initiative underway. IT transformation looks different at different companies, but essentially it is about incorporating current digital trends such as cloud-based IT models and DevOps practices.

The words ‘digital transformation’ can be heard everywhere. Constantly mentioned in business context, it may seem as if digital transformation is here to overthrow entire industries. At LeanIX, we view digital transformation as an important tool to redefine your business and catapult your organization swiftly into the digital age.

What exactly is digital transformation, and what has been its effect on Enterprise Architecture?

Digital transformation is changing all aspects of our world. From spurring various IT initiatives, to fully integrating communication, to changing the way we use our personal devices at home.

Image source Gerd Leonhard

The role of digital technology fundamentally enables innovation and disruption. Absolutely no industry is shielded from digital transformation.

The taxi industry has been proliferated by Uber, the hospitality industry has been shaken up by Airbnb, Netflix has blown the movie-rental industry out of the water, and the music industry swiftly changed models from CDs to streaming thanks to applications like Spotify and Pandora.

More and more companies are seeing the benefit of moving to the cloud, and for good reason. Cloud technology offers many benefits to better suit agile enterprises to spearhead digital transformation and keep their company competitive in the ever changing business environment.

It is imperative to design an agile IT architecture to prepare for fast-paced changes in the business landscape. Digital transformation has brought forth a need to be hyper respondent to the needs of our customers - which include rapid deployment of innovative products, services, and software.

Nowadays IT works at an amazing pace, releasing one application after another to increase the customer's experience, but as soon as they think they are near their goal, their IT architecture fails them and they must start again from scratch. The integration of legacy systems into the digital world means that one must resource to a lot of new measures, making this task very tedious…thus, no company should deceive itself (and its employees) into thinking that a new IT architecture can be built from nothing to get ahead in the digital age.

In our series of blog posts on the role of lean EAM on the way to digital transformation, today's post looks at the low hanging fruits waiting to be picked. The way to digital excellence is long and tedious, as organizational priorities, culture and politics must not be overlooked. One key recommendation is to regard the introduction of a lean EAM as a change management project. However don’t assume you will be able to address the entire change in one big-bang, but be prepared for an iterative, evolutionary approach. There are three main messages from change management experience that are inevitable:

• Build strong, lasting coalitions.
• Focus on business value early on.
• Don’t condemn change - embrace it.

This year's  Insight, the annual conference of our certified partner  MID, was dedicated to digitization. Existing business models are questioned and new ones evolve, with IT moving from supplier to core ingredient of these new models. More than 500 visitors at NürnbergMesse discussed in three parallel tracks about modern and innovative ways how companies can react to these challenges. Additional tracks were concerned with BPM, Agile, BI and SAP as well as with MID's products Innovator and  smartfacts. LeanIX was there as Gold Partner, with a booth and a talk.

In the second of our series of blog posts on lean EAM, we will be looking at how Enterprise Architecture can form the backbone of a company's digitization efforts. Since John Zachman published his ontological framework in 1987, many companies have seen central Enterprise Architecture teams evangelizing and pushing into the direction of Business-IT alignment. Almost 30 years later, the discipline EAM has evolved, standardization has been applied, e.g. TOGAF or Archimate, but in most companies, EAM has either failed completely or is reduced to a minor part, e.g. to IT architecture only. Effectively speaking, it plays in no way a critical role in advancing the mentioned transformation capabilities.