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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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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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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State of Enterprise Architecture 2023 Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

The State of Enterprise Architecture report results are in! Nearly 1,000 enterprise architects and other senior IT and business stakeholders participated in this year’s survey.

We set out with 4 overarching questions in mind:

1. Are teams equipped to meet their organizations’ demands?
2. How mature are the practices of today?
3. Are those practices making a difference to IT and business change initiatives?
4. How can organizations amplify the impact and effectiveness of their resources?

Enterprise architecture’s search for influence

According to respondents of the report, most teams still need to improve how the mission and value of enterprise architecture are perceived across their organization. Sixty-five percent of respondents saw room for improvement, as illustrated in figure 1 below.

Fig. 1: Extract from EA Maturity Self-Assessmen

The need to improve this perception is born out in other survey findings. Only 36% of respondents claimed to have adequate resources in their team. Even 44% said they were under-resourced, and 20% said their team was severely under-resourced.

Ensuring senior management understands enterprise architecture value is a good recipe for gaining the budget and headcount required.

So, it was logical to hear from our survey respondents that improving this picture was a top priority for the year ahead. As shown in figure 2, when asked to identify their top three improvement priorities to increase enterprise architecture’s impact at their organization, improving the communication of their value to the business top scored with 55%

Fig. 2: Top Priorities to Improve EA’s Organizational Impact 

But playing devil’s advocate for a moment, I’d like to suggest that we treat this objective as an outcome rather than a goal in itself.

A team isn’t going to hire PR consultants to improve their customers’ perceptions. So focusing on this outcome seems a non-starter to me.

Looking at the other improvement priorities that survey respondents said they’d focus on in 2023; one doesn’t have to go far down the list to find a more practicable suggestion. In third place, we have: “Deliver more strategic insights to support strategy and investment decisions.”

Surely, by moving this to priority #1,  teams will have more value to communicate to the business and thereby gain more active support from senior management.

One of the learning resources we signpost from the main report is our guide to supporting boardroom decisions with data and enterprise architecture.

For those that want to improve the perception of enterprise architecture in their organization, this seems an excellent place to start. It’s a case of perception being reality, where reality had better come first.

We signpost several other helpful learning resources in the report, including:

• How to better support cybersecurity, risk, and compliance priorities
• How to facilitate enterprise-wide collaboration
• The benefits of integrating enterprise architecture and BPM
• Six steps to create an agile enterprise architecture management capability

Plus, we describe a package of assessment instruments and a shared maturity model to help identify improvement opportunities for your enterprise architecture practice.

What else can you learn from the report?

With 44 pages packed with charts and analyses, there’s lots more that you can learn from the 2023 State of Enterprise Architecture report:

• Changing demand and priorities: Learn how the demand for enterprise architecture services is growing and what kinds of projects drive the demand.
• Resourcing talent: How are teams resourced, and how hard is it to recruit and retain key talent?
• Maturity self-assessment: How did respondents score their maturity, and how do you compare?
• Benefits and outcomes: To what degree are organizations delivering the benefits and outcomes needed from their  endeavors?
• Operational trends: What systems and content types have organizations integrated with their enterprise architecture tools? What enterprise architecture deliverables and artifacts are most used? How successful are teams at engaging with IT and business stakeholders? Respondents’ top improvement priorities, and more.
• The maturity advantage: How do high and low maturity organizations compare on numerous performance measures?
• How to amplify the impact and effectiveness of your enterprise architecture resources: We explore the force-multiplier effect of a fit-for-purpose enterprise architecture platform.

The report highlights ​​9 key findings:

1. Increasing demand for enterprise architecture services. Sixty-two percent of respondents said that demand for enterprise architecture services had increased in the past year. Of these, 17%  said that demand had increased significantly.
2. Enterprise architecture teams are under-resourced. Sixty-four percent of respondents said their team was under-resourced or severely under-resourced. Seventy percent of respondents described hiring and retaining enterprise architecture talent as a challenge.
3. There’s a maturity gulf between high and low performers. Analysis of self-assessment scores revealed a 5.8 times maturity gap between the top quartile “EA Leaders” and the bottom quartile “EA Laggards.”
4. Maturity leaders claim an organizational agility advantage. According to respondents, organizational agility is three times higher for those with top quartile maturity than those with bottom quartile maturity.
5. Maturity leaders deliver superior benefits. Compared to laggards, leaders were nearly three times more confident that their practice delivered numerous IT and strategic business benefits.
6. ​​​Most teams still struggle to provide strategic business outcomes. Only 26% of respondents fully agreed that their practice delivered strategic benefits, including improved organizational agility, identification of innovation opportunities, improved CX, and faster time to market.
7. Selling enterprise architecture’s value to the business remains the top improvement priority. Asked to identify their top three improvement priorities to increase enterprise architecture’s impact at their organization, “Improving the communication of enterprise architecture’s value to the business” came first with 55% of respondents.
8. Stakeholder engagement is higher among maturity leaders. Maturity leaders are more than twice as successful at increasing stakeholder engagement and consumption of enterprise architecture insights compared to maturity laggards.
9. A capable enterprise architecture management platform improves the value of deliverables. On average, those happiest with their enterprise architecture tooling were 44% more likely to agree that their deliverables were current and relevant to support change compared to those least satisfied with their tooling.

The findings clearly show that mature capabilities are fundamental to organizations’ ability to make well-informed business and technology change decisions. Moreover, organizations with the most mature capabilities were least likely to highlight that their teams were under-resourced.

Download the full report for more information

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The 7 Key Future Trends Shaping Your Enterprise Architecture Program Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

Successful enterprise architects bring to bear a wealth of expertise across the business and the organization. They demonstrate their professional expertise by using an integrated SaaS platform like Bizzdesign Horizzon to get executives and IT change leaders proactive and dynamic insights to drive transformation and value delivery. But successful architects don’t travel alone…

Apart from our vision to develop meaningful software that will support you in bringing change to your organization, we’re also here to help you gain more knowledge on where the enterprise architecture industry is heading. For this, I’ve recently rounded up a group of Bizzdesign’s industry experts to compile a list of enterprise architecture trends that will impact your work in the coming months.

Bizzdesign’s heritage spans more than 23 years, with origins in the academic world. Having a quizzical mindset certainly hasn’t changed for us over the years, and we’re still known for attracting the brightest minds in the industry. They bring you their knowledge from years of experience working in technology and business and from listening to hundreds of customers sharing their learnings and experiences.

I’m including extracts from our top three trends below. Click on the banner below to download our full guide for our complete trends list.

Top 3 enterprise architecture trends

Extracts from our guide:

#Nr 1 trend: Enterprise Architect as the influencer

• The nature of the enterprise architect’s role has changed and continues to change significantly to more of an influencer and enabler rather than a decision maker or enforcer.
• Enterprise architects are increasingly working to create an environment that supports innovation and experimentation, providing freedom and autonomy to teams to create new digital products and capabilities.
• Enterprise architects also provide the right information and insights to help those teams align with targeted business goals and outcomes, and provide transparency and traceability for those decisions. Find out more in our trends guide.

#Nr 2 trend: Sustainability

• Action on climate change is gathering pace, but carbon emissions are only a small piece of the much wider sustainability agenda.
• The drive for transparency isn’t new but is getting renewed pressure from many stakeholders – from financial markets and investors to charities and regulators. What’s new is that ‘greenwashing’ is no longer tolerated, and companies are expected to take action. The question is what actions to take and how to prioritize them.
• With its holistic perspective and articulation of how different parts of an enterprise link together, enterprise architecture is uniquely well-placed to provide answers. Read more about the steps you can take in our guide.

#Nr 3 trend: Artificial Intelligence

• ChatGPT has unleashed a new wave of Artificial Intelligence on the public. LinkedIn posts of people sharing their ChatGPT examples are widespread – having the AI tool drafts all kinds of content, from haikus to work reports.
• AI is now a publicly accessible technology that’s rapidly approaching human intelligence levels. For enterprise architects, AI will become a more practical technology enabling smarter design practices.
• Complementary, enterprise architects need to design architectures that support the successful application of AI to achieve business outcomes. We give you tips on how to approach AI in our guide.

We’d like to hear from you..

To learn more, download our full guide . I’m also interested in hearing your views. Are the trends we’ve listed already impacting your work?

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The top 5 Software-as-a-Service trends impacting (enterprise) architects Latest news from (my website): Bizzdesign

Software-as-a-Service is increasingly playing a critical role in the efficiency and effectiveness of all work processes in various industries. Over the last decades, we’ve seen that software has a disruptive power with the ability to create or make some jobs obsolete.

Not only technology industries but end markets too, are impacted by software. It’s a major driver for digital transformation and digitalization in many industries and the wider society. Due to all these factors, for decades now, the software industry has shown double-digit growth.

Main Capital Partners has been investing in enterprise software companies for the last two decades – we also acquired a majority stake a couple of years ago in Bizzdesign, an enterprise architecture and BPM SaaS platform vendor. Our Market Intelligence and Performance Excellence practice is dedicated to, among others, tracking trends and drivers of the software industry. We observe new technologies rising in the market and look at the business and societal implications of these.

ALSO READ: Insights on Enterprise Architecture Strategy 

Stay competitive in a changing market

One thing that I’ve found helpful for customers is to gain insight into the market dynamics of the software industry. As an architect, you may help C-level management make the right transformation – and software – investment decisions. You may be confronted, perhaps daily, with yet another new SaaS tool that has the promise of addressing user needs in the business. From that perspective, it’s important to know where software vendors will be heading in 2023.

Looking back – during the pandemic, we’ve witnessed an accelerated effect of digitalization in many end markets. For example, in education, we saw significant growth in e-learning, virtual classroom software, and more horizontal business software for digital collaboration. That led to many new SaaS start-ups jumping on these digitalization waves. However, many software solutions were invented based only on a ‘good idea’, a promise of high growth and without a proven profitable business model.

The dynamics changed in the last year. Economic uncertainty and an increase in interest rates placed the focus again on software companies with a proven product-market fit and with successful, profitable business models.

This shift from ‘everything related to digital = potentially interesting for our company’ to ‘let’s focus on SaaS solutions that really matter, are robust and are delivered by reliable, profitable growth Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)’, is relevant for enterprise architects. After all, apart from the question: ‘How does this solution fit technically and architecturally in our IT landscape, and which business use cases does it support?’, it also emphasizes the predictability and reliability of the ISV and its delivery process.

Architects take note: Top 5 Software-as-a-Service trends you need to know

What are the Software Trends Impacting Enterprise Architects in the near future? Read my summary below:

1. (More) adoption of AI in Software-as-a-Service solutions
   Software vendors are increasingly adopting specific technologies to create immediate value for end users, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of them. AI will gain more relevancy in software solutions regarding work processes for end-users (e.g., with the help of personalization or process automation).
2. Integrations and operability as part of a larger ecosystem
   Software vendors will place more focus on integrations and operability. Not only from a technical perspective (e.g., managing APIs or the rise of data platforms/ iPaaS) but also from a larger ecosystem perspective and by focusing on collaboration in different verticals and industries. This also means that software vendors must understand these industry relationships if they want to use software for change.Take healthcare, for example, where a broader view on interoperability, standardization, and integration becomes more important. Data exchange protocols and standards in the healthcare system are needed to facilitate collaboration between all parties involved in this ecosystem (for example, the patient, healthcare providers, and the hospital) to drive innovation and make an impact.
3. Addressing digital security with contextual learning
   Since technology and software are everywhere, it also becomes a weak link in organizations. Digital security is becoming more important since our lives are digitally enabled and supported. Companies can invest in technology (e.g., monitoring/ security information and event management, endpoint protection, and identity and access management), but behavior and awareness of employees are even more important. Software vendors will focus more on resilience, contextualized learning and awareness training where employees can relate everything they learn to their everyday working lives.
4. Adoption of Low/No code platforms, accelerated by IT Talent scarcity and the need to control IT maintenance costs
   How do we train or educate for all the jobs in the IT, software, and technology industries? How do we get the most out of our talent pool or retrain people?
   These questions come to the fore in light of global talent or resource scarcity, especially since so many work processes and industries are digitalized. More people are needed to maintain solutions and systems, and to continuously develop those solutions. Because of the increased need for IT professionals and software developers specifically, the adoption of low/no-code platforms will accelerate in the next years: it’s simply easier to learn working with those platforms than learning coding in programming languages. As an enterprise architect, you will be confronted more with solutions that have their foundation in low-no code platforms.
5. Creating software for social change
   There is a trend that software companies don’t start creating products that are technically great or just a good idea, but with a ‘problem worth solving’. More software companies will create solutions contributing to major societal challenges, e.g., lifelong learning, healthy aging, and the circular economy. We’ll see more of this in the future.I believe that enterprise architects could adopt the same thinking to make your work more meaningful. Instead of looking at the IT landscape in isolation or the business impact it can make, also think of how you can design architecture for social change.

About the author:

Bram Kaashoek

Partner and Chief Operating Officer at Main Capital Partners

Bram is currently a Partner and the Chief Operating Officer at Main Capital Partners. Main is an investment firm in the B2B enterprise software industry in the Benelux, DACH, and Nordics regions with more than Euro 2bn in assets under management. Bram authored this article when he headed the international Market Intelligence & Performance Excellence Practice. The Market Intelligence practice researches the software industry, specific segments, and economic and technological trends and drivers. The Performance Excellence practice assists portfolio firms with strategic advice and implementation (financial management and operations, go-to-market and strategy, product management and technology), driving profitable growth.

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