How Digital Complexity Is Outpacing Strategic Planning Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

Digital transformation has become synonymous with progress. Every new platform promises agility, every integration the potential to scale, and every cloud migration a faster path to innovation. But beneath the surface of this rapid evolution lies a growing problem:

Digital complexity is compounding—faster than most organizations can strategically manage

What started as a push to modernize has evolved into a tangled web of systems, processes, and tools. Enterprises are now navigating sprawling application portfolios, fragmented data ecosystems, and multi-cloud infrastructures, all while trying to stay responsive to market demands. Then throw another variable in the mix: AI.

The Data Paints a Stark Picture:

• Only 35% of digital transformation initiatives achieve their intended outcomes. (BCG)
• 70% of IT budgets are consumed maintaining existing systems—leaving little room for innovation. (Forrester)
• 85% of organizations admit they lack a unified enterprise architecture (EA) strategy. (Gartner)

Without a clear architectural backbone, every new technology initiative adds weight instead of creating lift. AI, in particular, is amplifying this challenge.

The AI Effect: Complexity Multiplied

AI is now seen as the next great enabler—offering possibilities from predictive analytics to intelligent automation. But it’s also accelerating the pace at which organizations deploy new tools, connect systems, and process data.

The result? Even more complexity.

AI thrives on access to clean, well-structured data and orchestrated processes. But most organizations struggle to answer basic questions:

• What are our core business processes, and where are the inefficiencies?
• Which systems are connected? How? Why?
• Where are the critical APIs, and who governs them?
• How many versions of the same capability are we running across the business?

When these answers are unclear, AI becomes just another layer on top of an already strained foundation.

What’s Fueling the Complexity Surge?

1. Tech Sprawl

The explosion of SaaS tools, microservices, and shadow IT—especially with low-code and AI platforms—creates overlap and fragmentation across the enterprise.

2. Siloed Decision-Making

Departments pursue isolated digital initiatives without architectural oversight, leading to redundancies and disconnected experiences.

3. Tactical Thinking

Too often, transformation efforts prioritize speed over design. New tools are implemented before business processes are optimized, leaving architecture behind.

4.  AI Adoption Without Architecture

AI introduces new dependencies—on data pipelines, APIs, security layers, and governance. Without visibility into how systems work together, automation can’t scale—and risks multiply.

Flipping the Script: From Chaos to Clarity

AI doesn’t have to add chaos. In fact, it can be the key to untangling it—if organizations take a strategic approach. Here’s how:

Use Enterprise Architecture as a Strategic Enabler

Enterprise Architecture shouldn’t sit on the sidelines. It must guide where and how digital investments are made. EA provides the structural map to align tech with business goals, avoid duplication, and identify where AI can drive the most value.

Establish a Digital Complexity Index

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Quantify complexity across applications, processes, data sources, and integrations. Track redundancy, misalignment, and technical debt over time. Use this insight to prioritize simplification.

Document Core Business Processes

AI-driven process automation only works if the underlying workflows are clearly defined. Organizations must invest in mapping, streamlining, and optimizing key business processes. This foundation enables automation to be implemented with confidence and scale.

Rationalize the Application Landscape

The typical enterprise runs hundreds of applications—many of them overlapping in function. Rationalization reduces cost, simplifies integration, and frees up resources for higher-value AI initiatives.

Get API Visibility and Control

AI and automation rely on APIs to connect data and systems. Without a clear API strategy, organizations risk security gaps and integration failures. Knowing where APIs live, how they’re used, and who owns them is critical.

AI: The Opportunity Hiding in the Complexity

The irony is that AI can help solve the very complexity it contributes to—if organizations build the right foundations.
With a clear view of processes, architecture, and systems, AI becomes a force multiplier. Intelligent automation can reduce operational overhead, AI copilots can augment decision-making, and predictive analytics can shift the business from reactive to proactive.
But without strategy, structure, and oversight, AI just becomes another system to manage—another source of noise.

As digital ecosystems grow, complexity is a given. But strategic clarity isn’t out of reach. Organizations that elevate EA to the center of transformation efforts—and prepare their data, processes, and systems for AI—will gain not just speed, but sustainable agility.

You can’t avoid complexity.

But you can architect for it—and design to thrive in it.

About the author

Luca de Risi – Chief Operating Officer – Bizzdesign
Previously CEO at MEGA, which merged with Bizzdesign and Alfabet in September 2024, Luca de Risi is the Chief Operating Officer at Bizzdesign. He leads the Sales, Marketing, Customer Success and Services teams, with a focus on driving business growth, strengthening customer relationships, and ensuring operational excellence. After various business development roles across U.S. and European markets, Luca served as Managing Director of MEGA’s APAC operations between 2017 and 2020, leading significant growth across the Asian and Australian markets. He holds a Master’s degree from EM Lyon Business School.

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2025 State of Enterprise Architecture report – New findings Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

Putting strategy into practice

It’s no good having a strategy if you can’t execute on it.

This year, for our fifth annual State of Enterprise Architecture report, we quizzed organizations on their ability to bring about change. In particular, we focused on how well they understand their capabilities and their insight into IT sustainability. We also asked about how they invest, and what the barriers to executing strategy are.

Respondents assessed their enterprise architecture maturity on seven criteria. We then worked out an average score and ranked the results. The top 25% of organizations we named “leaders”, and the bottom 25% are “laggards”. More than 500 enterprise architecture professionals and their colleagues took part.

We found that leaders invest more strategically, have a better understanding of their capabilities, and are way ahead in IT sustainability.

Download the State of Enterprise Architecture 2025 Report.

Understanding business capabilities

To successfully transform an organization requires a good understanding of its capabilities today and how they need to change in the future. Capabilities are things that the organization does or can do, regardless of how they’re done. For example, “product development” might be a high-level capability, while “prototyping” might be a capability under it. The idea is that the entire organization can be described in terms of its capabilities, without overlaps or gaps.

There was a high degree of confidence that organizations could understand their business capabilities today. Just over half of organizations rated their understanding as good, and 25% said it was very good. 43% have a good vision for future capabilities, and 29% said they had a very good vision.

However, a third of organizations have a poor or very poor ability to analyze the gap between today’s capabilities and those required to meet business goals.

In contrast, 88% of leaders said their ability to analyze the gap was good or very good. They were also significantly more likely to describe their understanding of today’s capabilities and the future required capabilities as very good.

Only 28% of laggards have a good or very good ability to analyze the capability gap, and only 39% had a good or very good vision for future capabilities.

See the State of Enterprise Architecture 2025 report for more details, including data on how well organizations understand the contribution that transformation projects, technology, and people make to business goals.

Understanding IT sustainability

Ethical organizations are working to reduce their environmental impact and are reporting on their progress. IT sustainability is increasingly a priority.

As the graph below shows, nearly half of leaders fully agree they understand the sustainability of their IT assets, compared to 25% of everyone and just 13% of laggards.

Sustainability information is only valuable if it’s easily available where it’s needed. We asked respondents whether they had integrated sustainability metrics with their business transformation planning tools. More than half (51%) have not, and only 13% fully agree they have.

However, more than a third of leaders (34%) fully agree they have integrated the required sustainability metrics into their business transformation tools, much higher than the 5% of laggards who have.

What are the barriers to executing strategy?

We gave respondents a free text field to describe their biggest barriers to executing strategy, and we then analyzed and classified the results.

You might not be surprised to find that money was the top theme. Although some spoke about economic pressures generally, many cited concerns with budgets, funding, and cashflow.

Culture was also a top barrier, with many talking about an unwillingness to try new things and change.

The third most frequently named barrier was management. There was a range of gripes, including their understanding of technology, their sluggishness in making decisions, and their lack of strategic direction.

It was encouraging to see that only 7% cited challenges with enterprise architecture and business architecture. This suggests that enterprise architecture and business architecture are not significant barriers to change.

How are investments prioritized?

Our survey found that money concerns are the biggest barrier to executing strategy. Demand for investment is usually greater than the available funds, so we asked respondents to tell us how budgets are allocated.

There was consensus that investments are often allocated based on regulatory requirements, who is most influential in the business, and what works for one part of the business.

Just over a third of respondents (34%) fully agree that investments are prioritized that contribute the most to strategic goals, with about half (48%) somewhat agreeing.

In comparison, fifty-six percent of leaders fully agree that projects are prioritized that contribute the most to strategic goals. Only 14% of laggards fully agree that investments are prioritized that contribute the most to strategic goals.

What else did we discover?

The State of Enterprise Architecture 2025 also reveals:

• Most enterprise architecture teams feel misunderstood, with only 19% fully agreeing that their mission and value were understood by their colleagues across the organization.
• The top priorities to improve the impact of enterprise architecture were to improve its development process, adoption, and how its value is communicated to the business. However, leaders can focus more on delivering business value. Their top priority is to deliver more strategic insights to senior management, chosen by 47% of them.
• Enterprise architecture leaders are twice as likely to be increasing engagement with C-level executives and board members, compared to laggards.

Download your free copy of the full report.

About the author

Marc Lankhorst  
Marc is Managing Consultant & Chief Technology Evangelist, Bizzdesign. He contributes to Bizzdesign’s vision, market development, consulting and coaching on digital business design and enterprise architecture. He also spreads the word on the Open Group’s ArchiMate® standard for enterprise architecture modeling, of which he has been managing the development. His expertise and interests range from enterprise and IT architecture to business process management and agile methods.

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Building the Future: Strategy, Growth, and Vision for 2025 Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

It’s been a great first quarter, and I’d like to take a moment to reflect on all that we’ve achieved since bringing together three market leaders in Enterprise Architecture. The merger of Bizzdesign, MEGA, and Alfabet has created a powerful force in the industry – one that’s already delivering results. Together, we’re building something new: a unified organization with a bold vision, strong momentum, and the expertise to help our customers navigate constant change.

For the first time as a combined company, we shared insight into our scale and momentum. We’ve now built a $115 million revenue business with strong ARR and a healthy EBITDA profit margin. With 600+ employees and over 2,000 customers, we’re continuing to scale with purpose.

Growth requires evolution. As we grow, we balance entrepreneurial agility with the structured processes that support scale. Concepts like target operating models, business process optimization, and strategic alignment are in our DNA. I’m incredibly proud of how quickly our teams have adapted to our new identity.

At our core, we remain focused on driving sustainable, profitable growth. Our current combined revenue growth rate over 20% is strong—but our ambition is to exceed 30%.

Market Leadership: Expanding our Reach

To stay competitive, organizations must move fast and stay flexible. That means aligning IT and business to plan, fund, design, and deliver change – while managing risk and ensuring resilience. Transformation at speed is the path to growth – not growing pains.

Bizzdesign is no longer solely an enterprise architecture company and is positioned better than ever to serve the evolving market needs. Our expanded portfolio now includes solutions in Strategic Portfolio Management and Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC). Collectively, we call this expanded vision Enterprise Transformation.

This comprehensive solution set uniquely positions us to support full-spectrum enterprise transformation. It strengthens our ability to grow client relationships, increase value for each customer, and reinforce our leadership in the market.

With AI integrated at the core of our offerings, we’re not just responding to industry shifts—we’re helping define them. This ensures our clients have access to best-in-class innovation.

Building a World-Class Workplace

One of our top priorities is making Bizzdesign a great place to work. We spend a large part of our lives at work—so it should be meaningful, engaging, and yes, fun.
We already have a world-class team. To take the next step, we’re committed to hiring and retaining top talent – welcoming the best people in the industry to help us serve new markets and build lasting impact.

Cultural Integration & Entrepreneurial Spirit

As we finalize our post-merger integration, we’re laying the foundations for a unified culture, shared values, and modern HR practices—all with an entrepreneurial mindset at the center.
I want Bizzdesign to be a place where people feel safe taking risks and learning from failure. Mistakes are not setbacks—they’re opportunities to grow. When we learn and adapt, we move forward stronger.

This spirit of innovation is a key differentiator. While some competitors have become rigid and slow-moving, we are building something agile, bold, and truly game changing.

2025 Priorities: Unified Strategy, Integration, and AI

The SaaS industry has matured rapidly, and we aim to operate in line with best-in-class standards—from sales and agile development to financial reporting and operational excellence.

Our strategy for 2025 is anchored in four key pillars:

1. Go-to-Market Strategy 
   Unify our brand, positioning and messaging, to sharpen our market presence.
2. AI at the Core 
   Embed AI into our business and product strategy as a true differentiator—not just a trend.
3. Unified Reporting 
   Standardize reporting and OKRs to drive visibility, insight, and performance.
4. Scalability & Integration
   Streamline processes, tools, and systems to enable long-term growth.

By focusing on these pillars, we’re setting up our business for sustainable scale, innovation, and impact.

Looking Ahead

This is a transformational time for Bizzdesign.
With strong leadership, top-tier talent, and a clear strategic vision, we’re ready to lead the way—driving innovation and building an extraordinary place to work.

About the author

Bert van der Zwan – CEO of Bizzdesign  
Bert van der Zwan is an experienced SaaS business leader with over 25 years in the software industry. As CEO of Bizzdesign since 2023, he has led the company through its merger with MEGA and Alfabet, uniting the organizations into a single, stronger entity. He continues to drive Bizzdesign’s growth, focusing on expanding its global presence and reinforcing its leadership in enterprise transformation.  Before Bizzdesign, Bert held CEO roles at Bynder, a leading SaaS digital asset management company, as well as at Twinfield, Onguard, and UNIT4 Group. Earlier in his career, he held leadership positions at Cisco/Webex and 3Com Corporation, gaining deep expertise in scaling SaaS businesses in the FinTech and MarTech sectors. With a proven track record of leading high-growth companies, Bert is dedicated to helping organizations navigate complex change through innovative technology and strategic vision.

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Digitalization and the Need for Speed Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

Many organizations are prioritizing a robust digital strategy that emphasizes agility and technological acceleration. The speed of digital innovation enables businesses to streamline operations and adopt digital solutions that enhance efficiency. As companies move toward digital maturity, they are challenged to achieve digital transformation while scaling their initiatives effectively.

As companies progress toward digital maturity, they face the challenge of driving transformation while effectively scaling their initiatives.

In a  previous blog article on the evolution of EA in business transformation we explored how business leaders face a wickedly complex challenge: responding to frequent, high-impact business threats and opportunities while managing an IT landscape that inevitably becomes more complex due to digitalization.
Adding to this complexity, leaders are pressured to move faster than ever without compromising compliance, security, or governance.

The Pressure to Accelerate

To illustrate, a senior IT leader I recently spoke with outlined ambitious transformation goals:

• 10x faster rollout of new solutions (a 90% reduction in elapsed time).
• 4x productivity improvement (delivering 4x more with the same resources).

These targets are not aspirational; they’re part of a board-mandated directive to radically reshape the organization’s operations, including transforming the transformation process itself.

This pressure to accelerate is not unique. Across industries, digital leaders face similar expectations, driven by competitive pressure, shifting customer expectations, and the constant pace of technological change.
The cost of delay is high: slower time to market, lost revenue opportunities, and the risk of being outpaced by more agile competitors.

So, what enables this acceleration?

At the core of this transformation are two key forces: digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI). Together, they offer the potential to break down silos, automate decision-making, and move from strategy to execution at unprecedented speed.

Enabling a Digital Backbone

Realizing true digital transformation requires more than technology upgrades, it demands a strong digital backbone: a connected, enterprise-wide foundation that fuels agility, innovation, and scalable growth.

This vision is grounded in three enterprise-wide priorities:

• Integrated data management enabled by a core set of enterprise platforms.
• Rapid delivery and evolution of customer-centric digital products.
• Aligned enterprise capabilities that deliver a seamless and consistent customer experience.

This approach reflects Gartner’s concept of Composable Capabilities, empowering enterprises to become more modular, adaptive, and resilient.

However, building this enterprise backbone requires more than vision it calls for a connected, end-to-end operating model that links:

• Strategic ideas to executable outcomes, accelerating time to value.
• Enterprise stakeholders across business and IT, fostering true collaboration.
• Automation and interoperability, integrated across the entire enterprise transformation lifecycle from strategy to delivery.

Critically, enterprise-wide visibility into portfolio initiatives, capabilities, applications, and data is essential. It ensures alignment, reduces redundancy and helps uncover risks early in the transformation process.

Foundational Enablers for Transformation

Successful enterprise transformation relies on a strong foundation of tools, insights, and collaboration. One key enabler is a centralized, enterprise-wide repository that is accessible to all relevant stakeholders.

Key enablers include:

• A centralized repository is accessible to all users, providing:
  o   Strategic context that connects initiatives to business goals and priorities.
  o   Visibility into both existing and planned enterprise capabilities.
  o   Insights into the impact of change across customers, teams, and the IT landscape.Strategic context that connects initiatives to business goals and priorities.

In addition, AI-powered insights help accelerate decision-making by:

o   Visibility into both existing and planned enterprise capabilities.
o   Insights into the impact of change across customers, teams, and the IT landscape. Strategic context that connects

• Identifying existing assets, data quality gaps, standards, and active initiatives.
• Allowing enterprise architects to focus on high-value advisory work instead of manual data gathering.

Architects and AI: Partners in Speed

Architects thrive in adding value where trade-offs and constraints, speed, cost, value, and risk are at play. AI augments this expertise by:

Together, architects and AI make a powerful team:

• AI brings together goals, requirements, standards, and patterns to suggest smart starting points for solution design.
• It adjusts those designs quickly as things change—without starting from scratch.
• It even helps engineers generate code, speeding up delivery through DevOps pipelines.

This isn’t a future vision; it’s happening now.

Closing the Strategy-to-Execution Gap

At BizzDesign, we tackle the strategy-to-execution gap with a robust framework. This approach enables:

• Accelerate transformation efforts dramatically, boosting both speed and productivity across the value chain.
• Connect the dots across key activities, enabling more integrated, enterprise-wide improvement.

By bridging vision and execution, we help turn strategy into measurable outcomes faster and more confidently.

Let’s Transform Together

We’re at a pivotal moment, an opportunity to rethink how transformation happens and what it can achieve.
At Bizzdesign, we’re here to be more than just a vendor; we aim to be your trusted partner in building a stronger, more agile enterprise.

We aim to be the leading partner, providing:

1.  Deep expertise, practical resources, and a global footprint.
2. An independent, objective perspective that can be relied upon
3. The most comprehensive end-to-end enterprise transformation platform to help turn strategy into lasting results.

The future of transformation is already unfolding.

Let’s shape it together.

Stay tuned for future blogs to share the capabilities we’re bringing to the market to make this a reality.

About the author:

Nick Reed
Chief Strategy Officer at Bizzdesign

Nick is responsible for value proposition development, building strategic partnerships, and driving innovation topics, including executing Bizzdesign’s ‘buy & build’ acquisition strategy. He has over 25 years of experience in B2B enterprise software and SaaS, dedicating 15 years to enterprise architecture and portfolio management.

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The evolution of Enterprise Architecture in business transformation Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

Quick Links:

1. Introduction
2. Drivers of business change
3. The complexity challenge
4. The power of a model-driven approach
5. The evolution of Enterprise Architecture
6. Core value streams in business transformation
7. The future of business transformation

1.  Introduction

Organizations of all sizes and industries face an increasingly complex and rapidly changing business environment that may hinder successful business transformation. The leading innovation author and speaker Peter Hinssen calls it the “Never Normal” – a world with more frequent ‘seismic shocks’ of technology innovation, geopolitical conflicts, and ecological challenges affecting the very fundamentals of business, and the ‘polycrises’ when multiple catastrophic events occur together.

This new reality presents a wickedly complex challenge for business leaders to understand and respond more quickly to this mix of threats and opportunities while simultaneously transforming their organizations to achieve business goals.

Organizations must embrace the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen next and methods that enable them to navigate this complexity early enough, or they risk going the way of Kodak, Blockbuster, and Nokia.

The original management guru Peter Drucker said, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

This evolving context demands a reevaluation of how organizations approach their strategic management. It calls for a more holistic and dynamic view of the enterprise – one that connects the dots across silos, be they organizational, functional, geographic, informational, or technological. An approach that enables analysis and insights that support strategic decision-making and transformation. At the same time, the pressure on business leaders to deliver faster change is only increasing.

While many organizations have a clear strategy, they often struggle to implement it effectively. Transformation activity quickly becomes bogged down in siloed thinking, vested interests, unexpected impacts, and unplanned costs and delays. We call this the strategy-to-execution gap.

This article’ll explore the key factors driving this new era of business complexity, its challenges, and how forward-thinking organizations adapt their approaches to enterprise architecture to bridge the strategy-to-execution gap. By understanding these dynamics, businesses can better position themselves to not only survive but thrive in an uncertain future.

2. Drivers of business change

The following primary forces are reshaping the business world:

Digital Transformation
It is obvious that digital technology is ubiquitous and pervasive in business today. Adoption is happening faster than ever – where it took Facebook 10 months to reach 1 million users, ChatGPT achieved the same milestone in 5 days.

However, we are still in the early stages of fundamentally reshaping how enterprises operate in a truly digital world with ever more powerful and accessible artificial intelligence, particularly Generative AI.

It’s not purely about technology adoption but how business capabilities can be radically reimagined with new digital products and services and increasingly intelligent automated operations. However, these opportunities come with risks, such as managing bias and hallucinations in AI models and managing privacy, confidentiality, authenticity, and copyright risks, where the provenance of generated content can be unclear.

Sustainability
We face an uncertain future. Climate change may be irreversible within the next decade, with impacts such as over 1 million species facing extinction, extreme weather creating a refugee crisis, and increasing costs and disruptions to commerce. As a result, consumers increasingly expect vendors to show a demonstrable commitment to sustainable practices.

This, in turn, means organizations increasingly require similar commitments from suppliers, resulting in the propagation of sustainability impact across the supply chain. Therefore, organizations must incorporate sustainability into their transformation planning and analysis to ensure their responses to business events and advance their sustainability goals at sufficient speed to meet their sustainability commitments.

Regulatory Compliance
Alongside these first two challenges, governments increasingly require organizations to meet regulatory standards around digital adoption. For example, the EU introduced GDPR for data privacy several years ago in response to online privacy concerns. In January 2025, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) will be applied to all financial institutions operating in the EU, reflecting the critical infrastructure-style importance of digital services.

In the aftermath of the Colonial Pipeline cyber-attack in May 2021, the US president signed an executive order shifting increasing responsibility for cybersecurity to private companies. This was followed in 2022 by new cybersecurity legislation for critical infrastructure organizations. Alongside these, individual countries and industry bodies are increasingly producing compliance and assurance standards.

Alongside these demands, there is a constant need to drive shareholder value in corporate entities and achieve policy and mission goals in government and non-corporate organizations.

3. The complexity challenge

Transformation leaders face a formidable task: making sense of myriad interdependencies across teams, business processes, data, applications, technologies, projects, and initiatives, both within their enterprise but also across partners, suppliers, and customers. This is all in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) business environment. Success hinges on connecting the dots across these disparate elements to understand the cascading impacts and dependencies of change and make sense of this complexity to improve decision-making.

Moreover, this complexity manifests as a significant challenge to agility and adaptability. If a transformation initiative has to spend its first six months gathering and organizing information about the assets in scope and how they relate to each other, fast and effective change is impossible. Even worse, if the result of this information gathering shows a landscape littered with technical debt and/or a web of messy integrations between applications and systems, the chances of fast results are vanishingly small. This is sometimes called the ‘boat anchor of IT’ or the ‘below the waterline iceberg’ that either slows down or sinks transformation.

To add to the challenge, this picture is not static. Change is taking place constantly – if not as fast as leaders would like – meaning the ‘as is’ landscape is a moving baseline. In many organizations, the information gathered about the current state architecture is outdated before an initiative starts. If you don’t know where you’re starting from, you have no chance of reaching your desired destination.

The crux of the challenge is not to avoid this complexity but to embrace it.

Complexity is inherent in large organizations, and digitalization only increases it. But it also comes with the means to see it, understand it, make sense of it, and manage it so stakeholders can get the insights they need when they need it in a meaningful form.

The key is to change the approach.

4. The power of a model-driven approach

Architecture is the discipline that deals with complexity and balances many factors into coherent decision-making. The obvious analogy is with designing a building, where the architect needs to factor in the purpose of the building (e.g., is it a family home or an exhibition center), key requirements (e.g. lots of natural light, plenty of collaboration space, or maximum affordability), constraints (e.g. budget, timescales, regulatory compliance), risks (e.g. what are the areas of uncertainty, or where might things go wrong) and key dependencies (e.g. you don’t tile the bathrooms before the plumbing work is complete).

Enterprise architects do the same thing but with less tangible, more conceptual assets like strategic goals, business threats and opportunities, business capabilities, organization structure, business processes, data, and technology.

In the same way a traditional architect models a building (maybe with blueprints on a page), an enterprise architect models an enterprise – or some meaningful subset(s) of it.

The power of models is that they can be queried to produce analysis and insights. The superpower of architecture models is that they contain semantic meaning about the things in the models that can provide rich insights for a huge variety of stakeholders, from C-level executives in the boardroom to technical practitioners in the ‘engine room’ of change.

The emergence of easily accessible Generative AI means these insights can be more dynamic, automated, accessible, and intelligent than ever.

Digitalized models also bring the possibility of sharing this information and these insights with other systems, increasing integration and interoperability across the toolchains in the enterprise. For example, a digital architecture model of a solution can be shared with adjacent tools for tasks like threat modeling or controls compliance assessment, avoiding the need to recreate the model – with the associated risk of human error – and providing the information where it is needed when it is needed.

The added benefit is that specialists in adjacent disciplines can benefit from the greater business context that enterprise architecture models can provide, enabling them to see how their work contributes to enterprise goals and to help prioritize their workload. Similarly, metadata from these specialist adjacent disciplines can then be populated back into the enterprise architecture models to enrich them, adding value to stakeholders who can better understand their enterprise.

However, given the continuously changing nature of the enterprise, these models must be dynamic, not static. This means they must be data-driven, not hand-crafted. The data must be sourced from existing systems of record wherever possible, leveraging the existing data ecosystem in the enterprise.

So, enterprise architecture practices must evolve to include new ways of working.

5. The evolution of Enterprise Architecture

We see three key trends shaping the future of Enterprise Architecture:

Democratization of Enterprise Architecture
The days of enterprise architects being the ivory tower experts with all the answers and the ‘no police’ of governance are long gone, if they were ever there in the first place. Digital transformation has ushered in an era of business and technology being closely intertwined, fostering the need for co-creation involving a more diverse set of stakeholders – business, data, and technology specialists – together with enterprise architects who can facilitate and coordinate this innovation in line with strategic goals and existing reference architectures.

With the adoption of more Agile ways of working, teams need to move fast and with the autonomy to make their own decisions without being slowed down by heavyweight governance processes while having visibility of the wider, longer-term enterprise perspective. Thus, the role of enterprise architecture is transforming to be more of an enabler of this more ‘democratized’ approach. Enterprise architecture provides the information and guidelines for these teams (of specialists and non-specialists alike) to make the right decisions and be more adaptive in providing the right governance models to fit any specific scenario (control-based versus outcome/value-based versus autonomous).

Consumerization of IT
We all use apps and digital services that are simple and intuitive in our daily lives and require no training. They are designed around us users and the specific tasks we need to accomplish (e.g., find new music that we will like, make a payment to someone we know, etc.). We increasingly expect similar ‘low effort’ user experiences in the enterprise IT we use to get our jobs done at work. This is what we call the consumerization of IT.

The consumerization of IT involves an intuitive experience designed around the user, guiding them to the outcomes they need for rapid value creation. This requires a clear understanding of targeted user personas, what constitutes value for them, and out-of-the-box, pre-packaged assets that make it easy and accessible for them to achieve it.

Increasing interconnectedness
As digitalization becomes ever more pervasive, we see an increasing number of APIs and integrations between systems, resulting in a profound increase in IT landscape complexity. Even though platforms and digital products aspire to consolidate data and business logic, the number of interdependencies is often increasing exponentially. This creates an urgent and important need for visibility, transparency, and traceability of dependencies and impacts, as well as an end-to-end line of sight between strategic goals and the assets and workstreams they depend on.

6. Core value streams in transformation

At Bizzdesign, when we think about the value that enterprise architecture can bring to transformation, we anchor it in the context of strategy-to-execution. Our goal is to bridge the strategy-to-execution gap.

We frame it in terms of three key value streams that together support end-to-end transformation value creation:

1. Business design: This is all about understanding if the enterprise is fit for purpose to achieve its strategic goals. This involves mapping strategy to current business architecture and assessing capabilities to identify maturity gaps. Business design determines where investments need to be made – or redirected – to align transformation spending with business priorities, with an enterprise-wide context and an ‘apples-to-apples’ consistent approach for fact-based evaluation from a single source of truth.
2. Portfolio Management: This value stream focuses on orchestrating gap closure with a consistent approach to optimizing portfolio investment decisions and planning and aligning roadmaps for change. It’s about prioritizing and sequencing changes to maximize value while balancing trade-offs across different time horizons and levels of detail (e.g., project-level considerations versus segment/ portfolio versus enterprise-wide considerations).
3. Execution and governance: This third value stream is about translating change initiatives into tangible business outcomes – where the ‘rubber hits the road’ in value delivery and benefits realization from transformation. It’s about connecting project execution-level activities, such as solution design and operational process design, with the enterprise context and ensuring appropriate governance regarding which decisions should be made and how and by whom – and also making it as fast and efficient as possible to ensure compliance ‘by design’ with standards and regulations, and ensuring visibility and appropriate management of risks.

   

7. The future of business transformation

As businesses navigate an increasingly volatile business environment with more frequent disruption, enterprise architecture has become a linchpin enabler to make sense of the complexity and improve strategic management of change. The future of business transformation lies not in simplifying our complex world but in embracing and managing that complexity to cut through the noise and provide focus and clarity for decision-making, accelerate innovation, improve efficiency, and deliver sustainable growth.

By elevating enterprise architecture to an agile and intelligent collaboration enabler that supports a broad spectrum of stakeholders in engaging in transformation, organizations can drive alignment and focus around their investments to close the strategy-to-execution gap. This results in faster decision-making and accelerated adaptation to responding to emerging threats and opportunities.

At Bizzdesign, we’re committed to developing offerings and methodologies that address these challenges. Our product roadmap is formulated to support our vision of the future of enterprise architecture, where AI-powered intelligent insights support a broad range of stakeholders in their transformation collaboration, providing intuitive and accessible user experiences with the flexibility and extensibility to meet the most demanding requirements.

About the author:

Nick Reed
Chief Strategy Officer at Bizzdesign

Nick is responsible for value proposition development, building strategic partnerships, and driving innovation topics, including executing Bizzdesign’s ‘buy & build’ acquisition strategy. He has over 25 years of experience in B2B enterprise software and SaaS, dedicating 15 years to enterprise architecture and portfolio management.

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What drives the success of top Enterprise Architecture teams? Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

Earlier this year, Bizzdesign released the State of Enterprise Architecture 2024 report, quickly becoming a definitive source for industry insights. This comprehensive research, based on a survey of over 500 Enterprise and Solution Architects worldwide, provides an in-depth look into our field’s current trends and practices.

Our enterprise architecture research report aimed to assess the maturity and impact of practices across organizations. By analyzing the findings, we could identify critical factors contributing to the success of enterprise architecture practices, which we’ll explore in this blog.

The methodology used in our survey

First, I’d like to share the methodology used to compile the findings. To gather the data, we surveyed 500 enterprise architecture professionals from different industries and company sizes globally to get a well-rounded perspective.
The report utilized self-assessment scores from respondents to evaluate various aspects of their enterprise architecture practices. In our survey, we asked architects to do a self-assessment of their team’s maturity, agreeing or disagreeing with seven statements describing a mature practice:

1. Our deliverables are current and relevant to support and drive change.
2. Our development process is well-defined, understood, and executed.
3. Our Enterprise Architecture helps align IT investments with long-term strategies to reduce risk and deliver business value outcomes.
4. Stakeholders across the business can easily find the Enterprise Architecture information and insights they need and work with colleagues using collaboration tooling.
5. The mission and value of our function are understood and valued across the organization.
6. We have sufficiently trained and business-knowledgeable practitioners.
7. We use an Enterprise Architecture Management tool that supports governed, collaborative design, adherence to industry standards, and powerful analysis.

Using these self-assessment answers, we divided the respondents into quartiles based on their self-assessed enterprise architecture maturity scores. The ‘Leaders’ were defined as the top 25% (top quartile) of respondents, while the ‘Laggards; were defined as the bottom 25% (bottom quartile) of respondents.

The analysis revealed a staggering 5.8 times maturity gap between the top quartile Leaders and the bottom quartile Laggards. This allowed us to compare the achievements and performance of the Leaders and Laggards across various metrics, including organizational agility, stakeholder engagement, and confidence in delivering IT and strategic business benefits.

Find answers: Explore our Enterprise Architecture Management wiki

5 Success factors of top enterprise architecture teams

Comparing these Leaders and Laggards leads to some interesting conclusions about the success factors of top teams. Here they are…

Success Factor 1: Strive towards maturity

Our survey’s results on business outcomes reveal that organizations with mature enterprise architecture practices are more effective in achieving their business objectives. This demonstrates how mature practices are more likely to contribute to organizational success.

The graph below shows that top-performing practices support their organization’s business outcomes. On average,  59% of the Leaders agree that their enterprise architecture program supports these business outcomes, but only 11% of the Laggards.

Which of these business outcomes does your EA program currently support

Additionally, findings in our report reveal that organizations with mature practices enjoy significant advantages compared to the Laggards, such as:

• Enhanced identification of cost-saving opportunities: Mature practices help organizations pinpoint areas where they can reduce costs, freeing up resources for innovation.
• Improved adaptability: Organizations with mature practices are better equipped to handle planned and unexpected changes.
• Increased visibility into IT assets: They have a clearer view of redundant, obsolete, and duplicated applications, leading to more efficient IT management.
• Better data flow and application linkage: Enhanced visibility into data flows and application connections allows for improved risk management when decommissioning applications.

Success factor 2: Stakeholder engagement is critical

In our survey, we asked respondents to rate various stakeholder groups on their levels of engagement, ranging from not engaged to decreasing, steady, or increasing. The graph below illustrates the average engagement levels for both Leaders and Laggards across all stakeholder groups.

Engagement averaged over Stakeholder Groups

The results reveal a significant contrast: Leaders report increasing engagement with 38% of their stakeholders, while laggards only see this level of engagement with 20% of their stakeholders. This means leaders are nearly twice as successful in enhancing stakeholder engagement.

More strikingly, 41% of Laggards stakeholders show no or declining engagement, compared to just 15% for leaders—indicating that laggards experience 2.7 times more disengagement. Losing stakeholder engagement can severely impact support and even jeopardize your position.

To improve and maintain stakeholder engagement, your practice must focus on delivering value outcomes to their stakeholders. Our report and my previous blog explore various business outcomes that Enterprise Architecture can support, providing insights into how you can effectively engage and retain stakeholder support.

Success factor 3: Use of Enterprise Architecture Management Tools

The report emphasizes that organizations using advanced Enterprise Architecture Management Tools tools are more capable of managing change. This suggests that these tools provide better visibility and control over the enterprise architecture landscape, allowing for more strategic and informed decision-making during transformation initiatives.
These tools also support governed, collaborative design, enable architects to adhere to industry standards, and they’re utilized for their powerful analysis capabilities.

Success factor 4: Focus on Business Agility

There is a strong correlation between maturity and business agility. Organizations with more mature practices demonstrate significantly higher business agility levels than those with less mature practices. This correlation is evident in several aspects:

• 51% of maturity Leaders cope well with unplanned change, compared to only 5% of Laggards.
• 61% of Leaders execute planned changes well, far exceeding the 7% of Laggards who do so.

Leaders are better positioned to anticipate change and more likely to outpace competitors in implementing changes. Since the speed of change in many sectors keeps increasing, this is the key driver for improving the architecture maturity in many organizations. Architects can reduce complexity and pave the way for rolling out changes more quickly, effectively and efficiently.

Success factor 5: Align IT investments with organization strategy to deliver business value

Successful teams help their organizations prioritize and align IT investments in accordance with their business strategy. In the graph below, we took one of the seven statements from the maturity self-assessment: “Our Enterprise Architecture helps align IT investments with a long-term strategy to reduce risk and deliver business value outcomes”. We correlated that with the increase or decrease in enterprise architecture budgets.

Our EA helps align IT investments with long-term strategy to reduce risk and deliver business value outcomes

The graph clearly shows that enterprise architecture teams with increasing budgets deliver greater business value by effectively aligning IT investments with organizational strategy. On the other hand, teams that fail to demonstrate business value experience budget reductions. As an architect, you risk jeopardizing your role and job security if you don’t contribute enough value to the organization.

Where to from here…? Next steps

Now that you have the success factors of the top practice we’ve discussed in this blog, your next steps will be to benchmark your practice. Doing this lets you set improvement goals and develop strategies to enhance your enterprise architecture maturity and effectiveness.

How to benchmark your enterprise architecture practice

1. Assess the maturity of your practice: To start, we’d like to invite you to assess your practice’s maturity with our maturity assessment tool. Our tool allows you to assess your maturity across multiple dimensions and use the insights to drive improvements, ultimately aiming to enhance business performance and strategic decision-making.More specifically, in relation to the research report, our assessment tool will allow you to identify your practice as a ‘Leader’ or a ‘Laggard’. Download our maturity assessment model here.
2. Benchmark yourself against peers: Then, download your free copy of the State of the Enterprise Architecture 2024 report. Benchmark your practice against the statistics in the report in several ways:
   • Determine which organizational business outcomes your practice is currently supporting
   • Evaluate your success in increasing stakeholder engagement
   • Evaluate the impact of your Enterprise Architecture Management tool on the value of deliverables.
   • Determine how your team can cope with unplanned change
   • Investigate whether your organization is prioritizing IT investments

By comparing your organization’s performance in these areas to the statistics provided in the report, you can identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement in your practice. Knowledge is power. Don’t delay, get started today!

About the author:

Marc Lankhorst  
Managing Consultant & Chief Technology Evangelist at Bizzdesign

Marc contributes to Bizzdesign’s vision, market development, consulting, and coaching on digital business design and enterprise architecture. He also spreads the word on the Open Group’s ArchiMate® standard for enterprise architecture modeling, of which he has been managing the development. His expertise and interests range from enterprise and IT architecture to business process management.

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Game-changing Enterprise Architecture Generative AI features you can’t miss! Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

Bizzdesign’s Generative AI features are designed to maximize business value and drive greater efficiency. Available as part of the Bizzdesign AI SmartPack in Horizzon: the How-to Coach and the Diagram Describer enhance productivity by streamlining onboarding and automating documentation processes. They allow users to take advantage of our platform’s full potential and generate enterprise architecture content more efficiently while freeing up time for strategic initiatives.

How-to Coach: Your AI Assistant in Bizzdesign Horizzon

The How-to Coach is an advanced AI assistant designed to enhance the user experience with the Bizzdesign Horizzon platform. It provides instant guidance, drawing from our comprehensive product documentation to answer your questions about the Bizzdesign platform. This feature has also been trained on our blog content, allowing users to access best practices and guidelines from our expert-created knowledge base.

This capability simplifies the learning curve for new users, helping you create value faster and to integrate into the platform seamlessly. Experienced users can leverage the How-to Coach to discover new ways to maximize their use of Bizzdesign Horizzon, extracting even more value from our platform.

ALSO READ: Our Enterprise Architecture Management wiki

With support for over 50 languages, the How-to Coach ensures that users around the globe can receive help in their preferred language. The assistant offers user role and product-specific assistance, guiding you on configuring and using Horizzon, and providing best practices and troubleshooting tips directly related to the platform’s features.

Embedded into every screen in Horizzon, the How-to Coach is always available within your workflow and ready to assist you whenever you need help. This contextual help accelerates user adoption through streamlined onboarding and instant support.

The How-to Coach excels at helping you navigate and utilize the Bizzdesign platform, and it provides scripting advice.  Please keep in mind that this tool is not intended to address questions about the content in your repository.

Diagram Describer: Transforming diagrams into dynamic knowledge resources

The Diagram Describer is a powerful feature that dynamically generates textual descriptions of diagrams. The Diagram Describer automates and enhances the documentation process, making complex visual information more accessible and actionable for all stakeholders. Users can now gain insights from existing diagrams, transforming them into dynamic knowledge resources that support better decision-making.

The feature is further enhanced with a prototype stage of text-to-speech functionality, adding another layer of accessibility and usability.

Need a personalized tour of our Generative AI features?

Discover how Bizzdesign Horizzon’s Generative AI features can revolutionize your enterprise architecture.
BOOK A CALL with our experts for a personalized tour.

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Unveiling the Enterprise Architecture trends report! Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

In the last few years, we’ve seen extraordinary changes in technology with the rise of generative AI. As a result of health emergencies, conflict, and extreme weather, supply chains have been interrupted. Costs have been rising across the economy. It’s clear that now, more than ever, organizations must be able to adapt and innovate. Each year, we survey the community for trends in our 2024 State of Enterprise Architecture report. This year, we wanted to see how enterprise architecture functions help their organizations to adapt to change.

FIND MORE ANSWERS: Visit our Enterprise Architecture wiki pages

The result? Mature enterprise architecture practices not only help to identify cost-saving opportunities, freeing up resources for innovation, but also smooth the path to planned and unplanned change.

Our methodology

We surveyed more than 500 professionals. We asked them to assess their maturity, by telling us to what extent they agree or disagree with seven statements. These included:

• Our enterprise architecture development process is well-defined, understood, and executed.
• Our enterprise architecture helps align IT investments with a long-term strategy to reduce risk and deliver business value outcomes.
• We use an enterprise architecture management tool that supports governed, collaborative design, adherence to industry standards, and powerful analysis.

Using these self-assessment answers, we could identify the top 25% and the bottom 25% of respondents, based on an average of their enterprise maturity scores. These groups we named the leaders and laggards. By comparing their answers to other questions, we could see the impact of mature enterprise architecture practices.

Identifying zombie applications

The easiest way to find resources for innovation and change initiatives is to use what you already have but aren’t using. It sounds simple, but our research highlighted just how big a challenge it is.

We asked respondents to estimate how much of their IT budget they could save by eliminating redundant, obsolete, and duplicated applications. More than half thought they could save between 11% and 30%. 15% of respondents estimated even higher.

How much of your IT budget could you save by rationalizing applications? n=275 

Here’s the but: many organizations don’t know where they can make the cuts. A third of organizations have poor or very poor visibility into unneeded applications across their IT estate.

How would you describe your visibility into duplicated, obsolete, and redundant applications across your IT estate? n=501 

What’s more, 42% of organizations have poor or very poor visibility of data flows and application links. That makes it risky to remove an application and is likely to lead to ‘zombie’ applications that are kept alive although they’re not needed.

How good is your visibility into data flows and application links, so you can manage the risks of removing an application? n=501 

Our research found a clear correlation between having mature practices and having good visibility of unneeded applications and data flows: Those organizations who have good visibility into unneeded applications more often use an enterprise architecture management tool that supports governed, collaborative design, adherence to industry standards, and powerful analysis.

Organizations with good visibility into duplicated, obsolete, and redundant applications more often use a mature enterprise architecture tool

Managing change

We invited people to score their organization’s business agility by asking them about their ability to respond to change.
Our analysis shows a huge gap between the leaders and laggards: Fifty-one percent of leaders cope well with unplanned change, as opposed to only 5% of laggards. Sixty-one percent of leaders execute planned changes well, far more than the 7% of laggards.
Leaders are also better placed to anticipate change and are more likely to out-change their competitors.

Enterprise architecture maturity strongly correlates with business agility 

Strong IT capabilities help to support change and innovation across the organization. Our research discovered a correlation between organizations that have increased their IT budget over the last year and those that say they regularly out-change their competitors and industry peers.

IT investors beat competitors on regularly out-changing competitors and industry peers. 

Achieving outcomes with enterprise architecture

Respondents told us the business and IT outcomes their enterprise architecture helps them to achieve, and once again, the leaders had the edge.

• Fifty-three percent of leaders agree that their enterprise architecture identifies innovation opportunities, compared to 3% of laggards.
• Sixty percent of leaders say their enterprise architecture identifies cost-saving opportunities, compared to just 10% of laggards.
• Fifty-four percent of leaders say that their enterprise architecture enables faster time to market, compared to 5% of laggards.

Does your enterprise architecture program support these business outcomes? Many more leaders than laggards agree that they do.

Leaders also outperform laggards in IT benefits. They’re much more likely to agree that their enterprise architecture supports reuse of existing IT assets, reduced security risks, and better IT investment decisions.

Leaders outperform laggards in IT benefits. n=434

What else did we learn?

The State of Enterprise Architecture 2024 also reveals:

• What encourages organizations to invest in enterprise architecture.
• The top priorities for improving the impact of enterprise architecture.
• How organizations assessed themselves on maturity, providing a useful benchmark for your organization.
• How effectively stakeholders across organizations are collaborating with the enterprise architecture function. We share a breakdown of the tools solution architects use, and an analysis of which business roles are increasing (or decreasing) their engagement with enterprise architecture outputs.

To deep dive into the results, download your free copy of the full report.

About the author:

Marc Lankhorst
Managing Consultant & Chief Technology Evangelist at Bizzdesign
Marc contributes to Bizzdesign’s vision, market development, consulting and coaching on digital business design and enterprise architecture. He also spreads the word on the Open Group’s ArchiMate® standard for enterprise architecture modeling, of which he has been managing the development. His expertise and interests range from enterprise and IT architecture to business process management.

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Step-by-step: How to develop Enterprise Architecture Services Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

Agile enterprise architecture management practices may want to consider developing repeatable Enterprise Architecture Services. This would allow consumers of those services (e.g., internal customers of enterprise architecture) to concentrate on their top priorities – running and improving their business – while being able to call on well-defined, expert services with clear value propositions and rules of engagement.

The idea of service offerings isn’t new. The concept of ‘IT Services’ first came to my attention in the 1980s through an innovative approach taken by an automotive company, which was a significant departure from the norm at the time.
The automotive company realized that their primary focus was to manufacture cars, not to master IT. They moved from primarily internal expertise to an IT service provider with the vision of outsourcing IT operations. They aimed to focus resources back on what they did best – building cars. They recognized that the effort to handle IT in-house was diverting valuable attention away from their primary mission.

The model they adopted was straightforward. Think of it as plugging in a computer: you’re not concerned with the complexities of whether it’s plugged into an electricity outlet and how that works. You just need the power to work seamlessly and without a second thought.

The manufacturer consumed a suite of IT services that functioned like a utility. They envisioned a kind of IT service – a comprehensive, worry-free solution where the intricacies of managing IT are handled behind the scenes. This allowed them to concentrate on what they do best: manufacturing and engineering.

You can think of Enterprise Architecture Services in a similar way.

What are Enterprise Architecture Services?

Enterprise Architecture Services refer to internal consulting services designed to build an effective enterprise architecture management practice to support the organization’s strategic objectives. We cover how a service is defined later in the article. It’s also important to note that Enterprise Architecture Services aren’t mandatory, but it greatly enhances the value the practice can deliver to the organization.

These services align with enterprise architecture capabilities and are developed according to well-defined value streams. The service capabilities focus on effective enterprise architecture management. These can be provided by either an internal services team or external, e.g., through vendor consulting. It’s more often than not a combination in which external provision is used to establish best practices, initiate a new service, or refine existing practices, then hand it back over to the internal enterprise architecture practice.

The point is that a well-defined service separates the ‘what’ (the service activity) from the ‘who’ (the service provider). Whoever provides it should provide the service at the same quality level, irrespective of whether they are an internal or external provider.

READ: The Fundamentals of Enterprise Architecture Services

How do you set up Enterprise Architecture Services?

When you want to set up a comprehensive set of services tailored to the dynamic needs of the organization,  focus on:

1. Understanding value streams and associated capabilities
   A good starting point before defining your service is to understand the value streams (and associated capabilities) that drive business value. The image below shows an example of enterprise architecture capabilities associated with value stream stages. These can be useful when adopting agile practices to invest and make continuous improvements around specific value streams and associated capabilities.
   
   Bizzdesign Horizzon and best practices support the capabilities described in this image
2. Understanding capabilities that enable a service
   Using the IT service analogy (above), a service is essentially an integration of various elements – be it computing power, storage capacity, or specific data processing functions. At its core, a service is characterized by a collection of capabilities it provides. To begin, ask: What defines a service? To do this, look at the kinds of capabilities that your practice needs to have.These capabilities, which encompass people, processes, and technology, act as the building blocks of the service. Imagine a service as a container that encloses a set of these capabilities constructed to deliver a combined function. As a result, you’ll be able to articulate a set of capabilities and offer them either as standalone services or as integrated service components.Another important aspect is how the organization consumes the service. Think of it like a contract between a supplier (provider) and a customer (consumer). When we measure and deliver the service, we can track where there might be gaps and close those gaps using good agile practice based on the value stream in which they exist.

Examples of Enterprise Architecture Services

A case in point: Strategic Planning Enterprise Architecture Service

Consider a hypothetical scenario where a company ventures into a new market: constructing and providing boat loans. They realize they must strategize effectively for this new venture and look to their enterprise architecture practice for guidance with this new initiative.

The boat loans company wants to understand if they should use the enterprise architecture practice Strategic Planning Service to help with this initiative. They need to begin by questioning the relationship between strategic planning and boat loan construction. The value of the Strategic Planning Service lies in its specialized expertise – not in boats per se, but in facilitating the strategic planning required to enter this market successfully. The service may include strategy mapping and alignment of the necessary organizational capabilities to the business goals surrounding the boat loan venture.

As a case in point, the company must assess whether it possesses the required organizational capabilities at the right level of maturity to compete effectively in the market. Do they know how to appraise a boat’s value? It’s crucial because without understanding the asset’s value, they can’t secure loans against it. Can they effectively reach their target customers with a winning value proposition? Can they do this at a cost that generates sufficient profit for an acceptable return on investment (ROI)?

Upon realizing a capability gap, such as not knowing how to value a boat, Strategic Planning Service becomes even more critical in formulating options and scenarios. This is to close the gaps and the trade-offs between options and scenarios to support decision-making. It addresses questions like:

• Investment alignment: Does our company have the financial resources, the budget, and the necessary tools to support this strategic move?
• Investment decision-making:  What are the benefits, costs, timescales, and risks across the available options, and which best fits our ambitions and constraints?
• Road mapping: What is the implementation timeline, and how does it align with our company’s objectives?
• Resource Allocation: Are new technologies or applications needed to value boats? If so, how do we integrate these investments to support the strategy?
• Portfolio Management:  What are the dependencies and impacts of change, and does this implementation align with architecture principles and standards?

By offering this service, the enterprise architecture practice can show how it can bridge capability gaps and align with the company’s strategic needs. They’ll ultimately provide a comprehensive set of choices for business leaders to make conscious decisions for the optimal benefit of the business, considering all the relevant factors.

By capturing these decisions – and the rationale for the selected options – the enterprise architecture team can record each service’s impact.

By consuming these services the EA practice was able to contribute to the market venture. This gave the EA practice a seat at the boardroom table.

3. Measuring the value of a service

I have noticed that architectural practices often fail to promote their accomplishments and measure their impact effectively. The ability to measure the effectiveness and value of the capabilities that a service is made up of is critical. Once you’ve packaged your capabilities into a service offering, you can attach a monetary value and other measurements.

Internally, the concept might seem unusual. Yet, services come with costs. People, processes, and technology all have associated expenses. A service composed of these capabilities must justify its cost through its value – e.g., its benefits to internal customers.

Establishing detailed metrics whenever a service is required within your organization might be a good idea. For instance, tracking the frequency of a service’s utilization, assessing its impact on the business, and gauging customer satisfaction can provide insights into its overall value.

While charging for every service rendered internally is not essential, framing these capabilities as services has merits. It allows us to effectively delineate and manage finances and budget allocations within the enterprise architecture practice. Additionally, sometimes you might want to deprecate a service because nobody’s missing it, which you’ll see instantly.

To ensure continued investment, it’s essential to measure and communicate this value, possibly through dashboards, which can demonstrate the benefits of the service to the organization. Without such metrics, the service, and potentially the entire enterprise architecture practice, risks being undervalued and underutilized. Proper valuation and communication of services are therefore not just beneficial but imperative for the sustainability of your practice.

In larger organizations, leadership may often evaluate the return on investment of the enterprise architecture practice by asking, “What tangible benefits have the practice delivered recently?” This underscores the importance of not only defining but also valuing and communicating the success of your services.

Finally, once a service is measured, we can understand what gaps might exist. We would engage in a continuous improvement process because we think of this as an agile enterprise architecture practice. This is where the business funds a team of people to engage in a continuous improvement process (which is an agile approach to keeping the service and associated capabilities up to date and valued).

Bizzdesign Horizzon manages and measures EA services

4. Managing service performance

By measuring the value of Enterprise Architecture Services, the practice can take a portfolio management approach to actively managing its services, identifying which services are most frequently used and which deliver the most value and/or ROI.

Once it has this perspective, the enterprise architecture practice can actively manage the services that provide low value or are used infrequently. Can they be improved to offer more value?  Is there a significant capability gap, and if so, what are the options for gap closure? Or should the service be deprecated in favor of redirecting resources toward higher-value services?

The enterprise architecture team can practice what they preach or ‘drink their own champagne’, in other words.

Manage your services with the right tool

While Bizzdesign is used to manage the business from an enterprise architecture perspective, it can also be used to manage your enterprise architecture practice. While managing your capabilities manually is possible, your efforts will be significantly streamlined using an enterprise architecture tool like Bizzdesign Horizzon.

Use the Dashboards in Bizzdesign Horizzon to show how the EA team contributes to value categories. Revenue generation is measured of hard numbers. Cost reduction is a soft number where there is a possibility to save a certain amount based on a risk or cost avoidance.

Bizzdesign Horizzon allows you to efficiently define and refine your practice as a service-oriented organization. You can bypass traditional methods like spreadsheets and documents, offering a more integrated and dynamic way to manage services.

Within our enterprise architecture tool, you can design your services and develop metrics to evaluate their effectiveness. This enables strategic decisions about where to invest and how to secure additional funding to enhance these services and their foundational capabilities. By using our enterprise architecture tool, you don’t have to be an expert in creating services, your only concern will be whether there is a demand for the services and for it to create value. Bizzdesign Horizzon can manage enterprise architecture capabilities based on people, processes, and technology.

To find out more about how you can create Enterprise Architecture Services in Bizzdesign Horizzon, book a demo.

About the author:

Dan Belville
Senior Pre-Sales Consultant

Dan is responsible for sharing Bizzdesign’s value by hosting customer-interactive demonstrations and delivering Proof of Concepts based on value-based use cases. With 34 years in IT at leading firms like EDS and HP, Dan has been specializing in Enterprise Architecture and Strategic Planning for the last two decades. His roles have ranged from Enterprise Architect to Senior Pre-Sales Consultant, contributing to the award of 2 US patents. His passion lies in supporting organizations to advance in strategic planning and architecture, adopt new methods, boost competencies, and guide them to mature their architecture and fuel revenue opportunities.

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How AtkinsRéalis creates shared value between solution and enterprise architecture Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

To effectively navigate changes, Enterprise and Solution Architecture teams need to collaborate to enhance an organization’s architectural agility and ensure a competitive edge. Ensuring that these teams coexist and complement each other to drive business value is often easier said than done.

Successful collaboration can be achieved by carefully managing touchpoints or points of interaction among teams, maintaining shared value, and fostering a culture of shared governance and ownership – and this is what we’ve achieved here at AtkinsRéalis.

AtkinsRéalis is a design, engineering and project management firm that collaborates closely with organizations to deliver smart cities or critical national infrastructure, like railways and expansive urban developments. Our architect teams consist of enterprise, data and solution architects who all play a crucial role in the building process.

We’re responsible for ensuring that project teams can adapt to changes quickly and effectively during project delivery. We do this by designing the architecture and supporting and providing a holistic connection between the different delivery aspects of a project.

Read on to find out the techniques we use to drive collaboration between our architects.

Learn how architects at AtkinsRéalis collaborate

As Technical Director at AtkinsRéalis, my main driver is to strategically build and nurture architectural teams to collaborate cohesively and enhance our business’s agility and responsiveness. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Manage team touchpoints through shared value

Learn how to leverage common objectives, align goals, and create cross-functional synergies to enhance your architecture efforts. Building a shared understanding among architects of business models, operating models and roadmaps is essential, as these constitute the three key touchpoints between teams.

Understanding shared value necessitates a thorough grasp of your business model and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) being tracked. It involves understanding shared catalogs, assets, and artifacts and thinking about using them through a common language. Shared governance around these touchpoints also needs to be understood, including who owns the catalog and how it is maintained. I will explain more about this below.

So, practically, how do we manage touchpoints at AtkinsRéalis? We create a shared mental model or a world view of what architectural designs look like in reality for a project and how they fit together. A shared mental model creates a unified understanding and vision of architecture among stakeholders in a project. This is important for understanding the bigger picture of organizational culture and to improve our clients’ experiences.

A digital twin is incorporated into this process, where we create immersive and interactive visualizations of these models. They’re critical in our client’s pre-building phases to understand how physical systems might operate and to make necessary adjustments.

We create our digital twins in a tech stack that includes an enterprise architecture tool, Bizzdesign Horizzon, which allows us to create visualizations and do analytics tailored to the decision-making requirements of specific audiences.

Source: AtkinsRéalis – Working at the intersection between dashboards, diagrams and GIS to provide a rich experience for both change agents and the customer

2. Maintain the value between enterprise and solution architecture teams

Winning over the teams you’ll be collaborating with is the most critical aspect of fostering a collaborative way of working. Understanding shared interdepartmental value is vital when coordinating across various teams.

Teams can maintain shared value through a variety of strategies. These include establishing a clear understanding of the interdepartmental values and ensuring they are driven out through behaviors, reward mechanisms, and ways of working so everyone sees the bigger picture. Understanding the touchpoints and communication styles among the teams is also necessary.

3. Foster a culture of shared governance and ownership

Governance in shared settings can be challenging, requiring substantial collaboration between teams, often across different parts of the organization. To govern teams effectively and holistically, it’s necessary to consider shared working methods. Focus on how assets and information are governed, maintained, and accessed within your organization, particularly between solution and enterprise architecture.

Establish a collaboration framework for two or more teams to facilitate a mutual understanding of the value they collectively contribute to the organization. These may include:

• Shared catalogs: Develop a universal understanding of your assets, such as software, processes, roles, hosting infrastructure, and physical equipment. You can surround elements with structured management and establish collective ownership by conceptualizing elements as catalogs and portfolios.
• Shared languages: Consider shared languages for articulating catalogs. This extends to whether you’re presenting lists in dashboards or creating more dynamic views and visualizations to promote an appropriate and understandable language UML, Archimate, BPMN (for those who know it), and rich pictures, images, and templated visuals for broader buy-in.
• Shared governance: Effectively manage the touchpoints, which typically fall between the organization structure cracks. Clarifying shared governance around interaction points is crucial. Questions like who owns the catalogs and how they are maintained are vital. Understanding who our joint enterprise and solution architecture teams serve is paramount.
• Shared personas: Create a clear and universal understanding of the customer. Also, consider your partners in the process, including change leads, compliance managers, security managers, and key strategic decision-makers such as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) or Chief Digital Officer (CDO).

Getting started today

The convergence of solution and enterprise architecture is more than just a functional necessity; it’s a strategic enabler for your organization. By fostering a shared understanding and creating governance structures around key touchpoints, your organization can navigate the complexities of its business landscape more effectively. This approach leads to more coherent strategies, better decision-making, and a stronger competitive position in the market.

As a starting point, to ensure synergies between your solution and enterprise architects, ask yourself a series of reflective questions:

• How can we build and visualize a shared mental model?
• Do we have the necessary technology stack to support this model?
• What is our culture of decision-making?
• How are we driving pace, change, and agility in our organization?
• How are we considering how teams work in parallel within a complex, adaptive system?
• How are we managing touchpoints with broader teams?
• Which architectural roles are we focusing on?
• How are we describing these roles, and how do they resonate with the customers and partners they serve?

See how Bizzdesign Horizzon enables you to create better collaboration between enterprise and solution architecture. Click here.

About the author:

Dr James Goodwin is the Head of Blueprint & Technical Director at AtkinsRéalis.  His team creates and governs the end-to-end digital blueprints for major change programs across several critical national infrastructure clients.​ James leads the AtkinsRéalis Agile Architecture course, which focuses on building adaptable and resilient businesses.​

James has a wealth of enterprise architecture and data analytics experience, having previously established the Office for Data Analytics (ODA).  The ODA enables the sharing of intelligence and vulnerabilities across Police, Fire and Ambulances services across South-West England.​

He holds a PhD from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory.  His early work led to the development of the NATO robotics framework, which now forms the basis for many autonomous systems, including rescue and mine clearance submarines.​

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Charting new courses: Bizzdesign’s bold year redefining Enterprise Architecture boundaries Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

We’ve had a big year at Bizzdesign where we’ve significantly impacted the Enterprise Architecture industry. Together with our customers, we’ve facilitated transformation journeys that have propelled significant growth and innovation – not only for our customers but also for us.

Our customers have repeatedly demonstrated that you can facilitate significant transformational change and measurable outcomes with the right enterprise architecture platform. We call this enabling ‘Change by Design’ with Bizzdesign Horizzon.

Let’s look at the milestones that we’ve achieved together with our customers in 2023…

An important part of our growth strategy is to scale up by acquiring companies with complementary functionality and technology, to complement our organic profitable growth. We don’t just buy revenue; companies must have a strategic fit with Bizzdesign.

We started to fill in on our M&A strategy by acquiring  UK-based Edifit, incorporating its product range and G-Cloud certification into our product roadmap to drive further innovation and enhance customer success. G-Cloud supports UK government departments in adopting cloud services, aligning with the government’s cloud-first policy and providing a streamlined process for procuring cloud services.

Throughout the year, we’ve also refined our collaborations with key partners, including industry giants like Amazon Web Services, ServiceNow, and others like Ellucian, Aquion-Australia, and ATD, to enhance our service delivery and customer outcomes.

Product innovation: Accelerating the Bizzdesign Horizzon roadmap

Bizzdesign’s product roadmap is the cornerstone of our innovation, charting a strategic course for delivering solutions that meet and anticipate the evolving needs of our customers and the market. We’ve doubled our investments in our product roadmap, significantly enhancing our UI/UX and AI capabilities.

By integrating advanced AI functionalities and solidifying our API proposition, we’re at the forefront of driving digital transformation with intelligent insights. Additionally, the appointment of our new Heads of Technology and User Experience (UX) steer us towards pioneering innovation.

Deep dive into our out-of-the-box solutions that provide templates and analytics for solving demanding challenges faced by architects:

• Enterprise Architecture Management
• Application Portfolio Management
• Solution Architecture Management
• Business Process Management

Customer success: Elevating engagement

Customer value is always our number 1 priority, and our customer success initiatives are pivotal to our strategy, with significant incremental investments in our team and services. We’re proud to report an unprecedented Net Revenue Retention of 108%, reflecting our commitment to building and nurturing strong customer relationships.

We’re also immensely proud of our Knowledge Center, which ensures our current and future user base is continuously educated.

Bizzdesign Connect, our annual user conference, was launched for the 1st time in 3 regions of EMEA, North America, and APAC this year. Leaders at Norsk Hydro, HSBC, and Ameren took to the stage to share their enterprise architecture best practices. For a playback of Bizzdesign Connect 2023 presentations, click here.

For Bizzdesign Connect 2024, we’ve secured Peter Hinssen, a renowned leader in digital transformation, as our keynote speaker. There is lots more about this event to come!

Market leadership: Shaping the future of Enterprise Architecture

Bizzdesign was recognized for a remarkable eighth consecutive time as a Leader and positioned highest for Completeness of Vision in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Architecture Tools.

Gartner stated: “The Horizzon product roadmap includes seamless interplay with ServiceNow, Smart EA Assistant, and a “How to Coach” guide to help customers on their EA maturity journeys.” 

Furthermore, the launch of our 2nd annual State of the Enterprise Architecture Report underscores our position as thought leaders dedicated to driving the enterprise architecture domain forward. A record 1,100 architects globally participated in our State of Enterprise Architecture Report, which gives architects the right insights to navigate their enterprise architecture journeys with informed strategies.

Here’s a look at uniquely Bizzdesign content published in the year:

• Read: Application Portfolio Management +: Why ‘Future State Enterprise Architecture Design’ is a Key Differentiator 
• Watch: Success Beyond Silos: Combining Business Process Management and Enterprise Architecture 
• Listen: How to build better workflows for Enterprise and Solution architects 

Closing note

As we wrap up 2023, we’re proud of our shared achievements and excited for what lies ahead. Thank you to our customers and the Bizzdesign team for pushing the boundaries of enterprise architecture to achieve great things together!

Here’s to designing and leading change together in the new year!

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Bizzdesign positioned highest for Completeness of Vision in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Architecture Tools Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

The 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Architecture Tools has been published, with Bizzdesign positioned as a Leader for the eight consecutive year.

We are also proud to be positioned highest for Completeness of Vision, which we see as an acknowledgement of our unwavering commitment to understanding the needs of our customers in an evolving enterprise architecture market, and bringing innovation to how we solve these challenges with our products and services.

These productized packs include solutions for Application Portfolio Management, Solution Architecture Management and Business Process Management.

About the Gartner Magic Quadrant

Gartner evaluated 15 enterprise architecture vendors and positioned them on two dimensions:  Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.

Completeness of Vision incorporates assessment of vendors’ market understanding, marketing strategy, sales strategy, product strategy, business model, vertical/industry strategy, innovation, and geographic strategy. Ability to Execute assesses vendors’ product/service offerings, overall viability, sales execution/pricing, market responsiveness/track record, marketing execution, customer experience, and operations.

To  get recognized in the Magic Quadrant, vendors must meet specific inclusion criteria covering revenue, number of customers, geographic presence and must support a set of Critical Capabilities including: repository, modeling, analysis, presentation, usability, configuration and management, extensibility, publication, frameworks, integration, automation and innovation management. The Magic Quadrant is the most widely-used analyst report to evaluate vendors when buying enterprise architecture tooling.

Buying enterprise architecture tools

With 15 vendors in the Magic Quadrant and 10 Leaders, prospective buyers of enterprise architecture tools must understand the differences between the many options available.

Bizzdesign provides a Buyer’s Guide to help enterprise architecture practitioners evaluate and purchase an Enterprise Architecture tool.

Organizations often look for enterprise architecture tooling to replace existing ad hoc document-based practices, or home-grown custom tools. In this scenario, the reasons for adopting fit-for-purpose enterprise architecture tooling include:

• Improved collaboration: getting everyone working together on a common platform that establishes consistency, coherence and workflow process automation for enterprise architecture practitioners and related stakeholders.
• Enhanced modeling: supporting componentized modeling and reuse, connecting the dots across previously-siloed data sets to enable standardized ways of working and dramatic productivity improvements.
• More powerful analytics: enabling visibility, transparency and traceability across the connected architecture models, and the ability to query and analyze them to produce deep insights to drive better business transformation decisions.
• Better stakeholder engagement: empowering stakeholders with the insights and deliverables they need, in the form they need, to engage and align all stakeholders in transformation decision making and execution.
• Enterprise scalability: providing a robust platform where diverse teams can get their work done, extending and enriching the connected architecture models across domains, departments, functions and geographies, scaling up to enterprise-wide collaboration across multiple
• disciplines with the appropriate governance, compliance and security to provide peace of mind irrespective of how large, complex and mature your organization is.

When setting out to evaluate and procure an enterprise architecture platform, it is essential to include vendors  recognized by Gartner as per their evaluation criteria for Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. We feel, this provides a reassuring foundation where Gartner has done the hard work of a detailed analysis covering hundreds of evaluation questions and several product demonstrations.

The Bizzdesign difference as an enterprise architecture tool

Including top-rated vendors in a procurement process is a minimum. It is vital also to understand what sets the top enterprise architecture vendors apart from the pack.

Bizzdesign supports many critical success factors for enterprise architecture practices, including:

Integrated solution

• Integrated platform solution: Bizzdesign Horizzon supports all transformation stakeholders in a single platform with enterprise focus from business motivation and strategy, through value streams and business capabilities, to data, applications and technology
• Fast integration: Enterprise architecture is all about connecting the dots across silos. Bizzdesign Horizzon enables fast and simple integration with external data sources and targets, including productized ServiceNow integration app and productized integrations with all leading enterprise collaboration tools such as Jira, Confluence and Teams
• Transparent pricing: budgeting requires predictability of annual spend without hidden extras, and you should not be penalized for adding more assets to the platform
• Flexible deployment: SaaS, on-premise, hybrid. Bizzdesign can meet the needs of any organization, without compromise on security, compliance and governance.

Modeling support 

• Guided modeling: Bizzdesign Horizzon provides model validity to ensure quality and consistency of artifacts, and a trusted single source of truth for analysis
• Future state design: you can only succeed in transformation if you know where you are heading. Bizzdesign Horizzon provides the ability to collaboratively design target and transition states covering business models, operating models, and the detailed process, product, data and technology architectures that support them
• Open standards: Bizzdesign natively supports open standards, including ArchiMate, BPMN, C4, ERD, UML, to provide maximum interoperability and accessibility to  the largest community of architecture practitioners
• Intuitive data management workflows: transformation insights are only as good as the information on which they are based. Bizzdesign Horizzon ensures data quality through workflow process automation that ensures non-technical users can maintain information on a regular basis

Consumable product 

• Collaboration for all teams: why should Business Analysts and Process Architects work separately from Enterprise and Solution Architects and Portfolio Managers?  They shouldn’t. All teams should have the context of how their work contributes to enterprise goals, and the visibility of impacts and dependencies across silos
  User-friendly experience: providing the right information to the right stakeholders in the right form through an engaging experience that enables them to contribute to transformation
  Extensibility: although you may start small and simple, as the variety of stakeholders and use cases grows it is critical that your enterprise architecture tooling can adapt and extend to all demands. Bizzdesign Horizzon provides the flexibility and power to extend and automate all kinds of tasks with advanced scripting capabilities.

Perhaps the most important factor though is who you choose as your partner on the journey. Will they be there for the long haul? Will they have your back when challenges arise? Do they have the expertise and experience to challenge you and keep you on the right path to success? Have they done the hard yards of developing open standards and industry best practices?

At Bizzdesign, we pride ourselves on our culture of open collaboration and eagerness to learn and improve in partnership with our customers. We are focused on enterprise architecture and all its related disciplines, and we know our stuff. We care about your success, and we commit to guiding and supporting you to successful business outcomes. Apart from our market-leading enterprise architecture platform, customers choose Bizzdesign for our people and culture, based on trust and our track record of customer success.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools, Akshay Jhawar, Gilbert van der Heiden, Andrew Gianni, Andreas Frangou, 12 December 2022. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.  
GARTNER is a registered trademarks and service mark, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 
This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from [insert client name or reprint URL]. 

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Microsoft Office vs enterprise architecture tools: Consider this Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

At Bizzdesign, we’ve had many engagements throughout the years where we were brought in to breathe new life into failing enterprise architecture initiatives. A common denominator across many projects was replacing Microsoft Office with enterprise architecture tools — specifically, a trinity comprising Visio, Excel, and PowerPoint.

In our experience, many organizations find it appropriate to start an enterprise architecture practice with a cheap, homemade solution. The thinking is that once some value has been achieved, they may (maybe) graduate to a professional tool – that’s usually how the story goes. We believe it’s the wrong approach if you want to do real, meaningful work that makes an organization more competitive in the marketplace.

Nonetheless, this thinking is ubiquitous in business and responsible for many failed transformation initiatives. To debunk the notion once and for all, we decided to explain in the clearest terms possible why office tools cannot support a value-producing enterprise architecture practice.

Bizzdesign and office tools

Bizzdesign and office tools
Here’s why office tools won’t work. Although office tools are invaluable for many tasks, they do not have specific designs to manage intricate enterprise architectures. Many organizations that initially opted for these tools encountered challenges that led them to seek specialized solutions later.

ALSO EXPLORE: Our Enterprise Architecture Management wiki pages

Additionally, an organization might opt for office tools because of the perceived cost-saving. However, this viewpoint often neglects the long-term implications.

Using specialized ea tools has a cost. However, the long-term advantages outweigh the initial investment. These advantages include increased efficiency, value-driven outcomes, and alignment with business objectives. The value-driven results that specialized tools can deliver make them an investment worth considering.

Specialized enterprise architecture tools like Bizzdesign Horizzon bring far more than advanced features.

5 reasons you need to consider Bizzdesign vs Microsoft Office:

1. Modeling and analysis
   We offer users a seamless, intuitive experience aiming to design and deploy architecture models. On the other hand, while Microsoft Office includes tools like Visio for diagramming, they aren’t specialized for enterprise architecture. Visio is versatile but lacks the dedicated features and functionalities that a focused tool like Bizzdesign provides. Models are much more than diagrams! A diagram is just a picture, but a model can be analyzed and visualized in different ways for various stakeholders.
2. Support for disciplines
   Bizzdesign provides comprehensive support for various architectural disciplines like Enterprise Architecture, Data Architecture, Solution Architecture, and Business Process Management, among others. In contrast, while Microsoft Office tools are versatile, they don’t offer specialized support for these disciplines. For example, while one might use Excel for data representation or Word for documentation, they aren’t explicitly designed for architectural disciplines.
3. Integration and collaboration
   Bizzdesign is built with collaboration in mind, allowing teams to work cohesively on architecture models and designs. Our enterprise architecture tool promotes real-time collaboration, versioning, and feedback. Microsoft Office tools, although equipped with collaboration features, especially in their Office 365 cloud version, are not tailored for architectural teamwork. The experience can be fragmented, especially when working on complex models.
4. Scaling
   Bizzdesign is tailored for both small and expansive architecture models. This ensures that businesses of varying sizes, from startups to global corporations, can benefit from our tool without experiencing scalability issues. In comparison, while Microsoft Office tools are ubiquitous and widely used, they are general-purpose tools. Their scalability in the context of architectural models is limited, making Bizzdesign a more suitable choice for dedicated architecture design and scaling, both in terms of the size of your architectures and to support collaboration between many architects across multiple distributed teams.
5. Customizability and specialized features
   Bizzdesign offers a range of customizable features tailored to the nuances of architecture design. From specialized templates to intricate design options, it caters to professionals in the field. Microsoft Office, being a suite of general-purpose tools, doesn’t offer this level of specialization. While they’re customizable to an extent, they lack the depth that Bizzdesign brings to the table.

Final word…

In conclusion, don’t leave your organization’s long-term success to chance. If you want to do a job right, especially if it is complex, use the right tool. Just like any other professional, enterprise architects and related roles require specialized tools to deliver results if you are to deliver on the promise of enterprise architecture.

Consider this: Does your Sales department use Microsoft Word to keep tabs and leads? Does Finance use the Word Windows calculator app for their work? Probably not.

The business reality is changing, and the ability to plan effectively for the future, make sound strategic decisions, and adopt and foster an agile enterprise is becoming more valuable by the day. The sooner you act on it, the more advantage you have over your competition.

About the author:

Marc Lankhorst

Managing Consultant & Chief Technology Evangelist at Bizzdesign

Marc contributes to Bizzdesign’s vision, market development, consulting, and coaching on digital business design and enterprise architecture. He also spreads the word on the Open Group’s ArchiMate® standard for enterprise architecture modeling, of which he has been managing the development. His expertise and interests range from enterprise and IT architecture to business process management.

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Future of Generative AI and Enterprise Architecture. Embrace the Synergy. Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

‘The future of enterprise architecture’ is increasingly intertwined with Generative AI, which isn’t  merely a fleeting trend. Generative AI is a transformative tool that can diagnose medical conditions by predicting machinery failure or directing traffic and goods flow. Moreover, its symbiotic relationship with machine learning (ML) reshapes IT structures and enterprise architecture.

Future of enterprise architecture in the Generative AI era 
Having a legacy spanning over three decades, enterprise architecture now faces the formidable task of navigating the burgeoning field of AI. The rapid technological advancements require enterprise architects to be nimble in recognizing potential trends, implementing transformative processes swiftly, and handling vast data volumes with finesse.

To surmount these challenges, there’s an urgent need for a transparent, holistic enterprise view. Enterprise architecture tools are invaluable in this quest, facilitating collaboration across various sectors. It enables organizations to assimilate diverse inputs efficiently and establish informed decision-making foundations.

Generative AI and ML: Reframing strategic approaches 
Today, AI and ML dominate the IT sector. Their roles range from countering cyber threats to refining IT management processes. The intricate IT frameworks of most businesses are increasingly reliant on AI and ML to decipher patterns, trends, and aberrations that might elude human scrutiny. These technologies help curate data models, furnish predictive insights, and orchestrate varying scenarios based on distinct data sources.

The intrinsic value of AI and ML in the enterprise domain can’t be understated, and their revolutionary nature continually evolves with fresh applications emerging frequently.

Signifying this paradigm shift, Andrei Karpathy, a computer scientist who served as the director of AI at Tesla, insightfully remarked on X, “The hottest new programming language is English.” The strides in AI, especially natural language processing, mean that software creation isn’t confined to traditional coding. AI can transmute human language instructions into operational software. This breakthrough has significant ramifications for enterprise architecture, making technology more accessible and democratizing it for non-technical users.

Using the right tools is paramount for successfully integrating AI into enterprise architecture. Enterprise architecture tools help organize and visualize the vast complexities of current systems and future AI integrations. Bizzdesign Horizzon is a comprehensive enterprise architecture tool that aids organizations in aligning their AI objectives with their enterprise architecture framework. With tools like Bizzdesign Horizzon, businesses can ensure that AI integrations are strategic, cohesive, and in line with organizational goals, thereby optimizing the potential benefits of AI.

Harmonizing AI deployment in organizations 
An organization’s Generative AI deployment strategy must be architecture-led or, at a minimum, influenced by architecture. Successful AI integrations aren’t solely about the technology but harmonizing people, processes, data, and technology. While AI’s capabilities are vast, the value of genuine human interactions, particularly in client engagements, remains irreplaceable.

However, enterprise architecture and AI benefits aren’t exclusive to global giants. Businesses of all sizes should delve into these subjects, seeking guidance from experts like Bizzdesign to strike a delicate balance. This balance involves leveraging AI’s transformative potential while being mindful of the swift pace of its evolution.

Moreover, as AI models advance, their computational power needs grow. It’s vital to consider AI software costs and the necessary infrastructure support. With dynamic market shifts, security concerns, and regulatory uncertainties, companies need a sound architectural foundation.

AI-Driven Business Transformation as an Accelerator

Operationalizing AI in the organization 

Implementing AI necessitates harmony between humans, processes, data, and technology. AI’s integration should be user-centric, ensuring comprehensible, actionable outcomes. Clear AI training and deployment processes are essential, emphasizing the data’s availability, quality, and management. This involves crafting a robust data infrastructure and meticulous data integration, purification, privacy, and security processes.

Adopting AI needs Enterprise Architecture

Understanding enterprise architecture lays the groundwork for agile processes, equipping companies for success in an ever-evolving global landscape.

Bizzdesign’s AI Center of Excellence

Bizzdesign’s AI Center of Excellence brings the capabilities of artificial intelligence to Bizzdesign Horizzon, its SaaS enterprise architecture platform. As part of this initiative, Bizzdesign has launched the Relation Recommender for ArchiMate, which streamlines and accelerates modeling work for architects by automating the selection of relationship types when connecting components in architecture models.

Additionally, Bizzdesign’s AI Center of Excellence is actively working on expanding its Generative AI capabilities in Bizzdesign Horizzon, with more exciting developments to be released soon:

• Reference Architecture for Generative AI: To support and guide customers in adopting generative AI at scale in their enterprise, this reference architecture contains a valuable set of principles, guidelines, controls, and capabilities that organizations need to consider, align, and adopt to realize the benefits of generative AI while also managing the risks.
• “How to Coach” AI Assistant: An AI assistant trained on Bizzdesign’s product documentation and knowledge base that guides users in getting things done in Bizzdesign Horizzon.
• Bizzdesign AI Bot: Enables natural language queries of the Bizzdesign repository that empowers non-technical business users to get the insights and answers they need to drive better and faster transformation.
• Diagram Importer: Converts unstructured diagrams into structured models using cognitive AI, eliminating the need for file conversion covering formal notations and unstructured diagrams such as whiteboard sketches.

For more information, you can read the full press release about Bizzdesign’s AI initiatives here.

In conclusion, the race towards digitization and AI integration in enterprise architecture is ongoing, with no slowdown. With the right tools, like Bizzdesign, and a comprehensive approach, organizations can successfully navigate this complex journey, reaping AI’s manifold benefits.

About the author: David Strickrodt is a Solution Advisor at Bizzdesign and an enterprise architecture and IT asset management expert. He’s also active in Bizzdesign’s AI initiatives.

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Elevate enterprise architecture design with Assisted Architecture Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

Introduction

Thriving in times of intense volatility requires organizations to realize operational efficiencies and productivity gains. However, they also need to pioneer new business models leveraging digital products and services – and do this faster and more effectively than the competition. Many organizations increasingly understand how enterprise architecture tools can help with this complex, multi-dimensional challenge.

Enterprise architecture connects strategy, business capabilities and business processes with the data, applications, technology and digital products that support them in ‘connected architecture models’. As such, enterprise architecture provides visibility of the complex dependencies and impacts across these assets. It also enables analysis of the models on a consistent and coherent basis to provide deep insights supporting better, faster transformation decisions.

By providing a consistent business perspective through which to assess, plan and respond to these external forces, enterprise architecture enables IT leadership and their key stakeholders to see the full picture, find the right path and execute with confidence on their digital transformation. We call this change by design.

A vision for the future

It’s not just about being able to analyze the current state of the organization. Establishing a vision of the future enterprise is critical to success by providing a ‘north star’ to align stakeholders and guide digital transformation efforts and strategic roadmaps. This is where enterprise architects – and their counterparts such as business, information, solution and security architects – come to the fore, translating co-created visions of targeted future business and operating models into architectural model designs. These enable analysis to identify opportunities and gaps that drive new products, services and roadmaps to achieve targeted business outcomes.

By describing these business outcomes in terms of goals, objectives and results, enterprise architecture models can directly connect them with the strategic and operational key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that allow business and IT leaders to track, evaluate and improve transformation performance.

Getting enterprise architecture right

Despite the benefits of enterprise architecture, many organizations have struggled to adopt it successfully. Too often, enterprise architecture teams have focused on frameworks and theoretical correctness rather than engaging with business stakeholders on their challenges and aspirations, leading to a perception of ivory tower academia and a lack of business value.

Today, enterprise architecture teams must focus on accelerating successful business outcomes and delivering value. This requires maximizing time spent engaging with business stakeholders, facilitating co-creation of targeted outcomes, and identifying gaps and constraints that will impede success. According to Bizzdesign’s State of the Enterprise Architecture report, as demand for enterprise architecture services increases – we see demand for enterprise architects and their skills at an all-time high. Efficiency and productivity become critical success factors for teams.

That’s why Bizzdesign has created our Assisted Architecture approach, which provides a simple and intuitive best-practice approach to doing enterprise architecture with pre-built solutions and templates that automate and accelerate value delivery.

Assisted Enterprise Architecture is inspired by The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and Design Thinking to provide a customer-centric and lightweight method for ensuring enterprise architecture value delivery through guided modeling templates that produce decision support analytics. Presented to users as a set of phases and steps, with comprehensive self-service guidance, the assisted architecture allows teams to choose whichever aspects of the approach work best for them in their specific situation. It can also easily be changed or extended to align with customers’ working methods.

Source: Bizzdesign Horizzon – Architecture-lead engagement landing page diagram

Source: Bizzdesign Horizzon – Application rationalization dashboard

Assisted architecture: Pre-built templates and solutions in a single platform

Bizzdesign’s assisted enterprise architecture allows enterprise architects to focus on the value-added aspects of their role. These include stakeholder engagement, co-creation and delivery of critical transformation insights to influence and guide impactful decisions, safe in the knowledge that their work aligns with proven best practice.

Moreover, this approach aligns with Bizzdesign’s other solution offerings that provide out-of-the-box templates and analytics for popular challenges, such as Enterprise Architecture Management, Application Portfolio Management and Solution Architecture Management. This enables enterprise architects to orchestrate and facilitate transformation initiatives while aligning all stakeholders and architecture work across transformation value streams in a single platform, ensuring consistency, coherence and a single source of truth.

By connecting architecture models across these disciplines, enterprise architects can provide a line of sight from business motivation and strategy to business model, operating model and target architecture design, planning, execution and business operations. This gives stakeholders unparalleled transparency and traceability.

Source: Bizzdesign Horizzon – Strategy impact model

Conclusion: Advancing enterprise architecture maturity

For many enterprise architecture teams, getting visibility of the application landscape and how it supports the business is a sufficient initial challenge. That’s why Bizzdesign provides out-of-the-box pre-configured solutions to help teams get started with the basics and deliver value fast.

However, we recognize that enterprise architecture teams can increase value over time by advancing their maturity, supporting additional stakeholders with additional use cases that leverage more value from existing models, and also enrich those models with new data and relationships. As the richness of the architecture repository develops, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts in terms of value.

When you’re ready to explore an enterprise architecture tool that can help you succeed at business transformation, we’re here to help. Book a call with one of our experts.

About the author:

Nick Reed

Chief Strategy Officer at Bizzdesign

Nick is key in developing value propositions, building strategic partnerships, and driving innovation topics, including executing Bizzdesign’s ‘buy & build’ acquisition strategy. He has over 25 years of experience in B2B enterprise software and SaaS, dedicating 15 years to enterprise architecture and portfolio management.

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