Like my previous blog post for companies to remain competitive they not only need to invest in low code platforms. They also need to provide their employees avenue to express their creativity. One of the ways companies can help bring new ideas to the fore is by implementing a center of innovation and investing in a dedicated team of cross functional members who can work independently and also invite employees to join from a larger pool. In the Forrester article by Schooley and Cameron, they list three main points on how to nurture creativity:

1. Trust
2. Acceptance of failure
3. Open communication

For companies to foster a culture of creativity they must adhere to the three points listed above.

In a different article by Gartner published 11 years ago, author Jackie Fenn encourages companies to establish a formal discipline. Along with making it easy for everyone to contribute ideas outside of their immediate work. Thematically this article is very similar to the one mentioned above from Forrester. In essence companies need to overcome their hesitance and accept the ebbs and flows of such an organization in order to innovate. Many times, companies take this initiative as a first step but as they yield no results, they tend to fall in what Gartner calls trough of disillusionment.

The idea is to build solid change management around the innovation factory and not lose hope and stay the course. I have experienced this trough of disillusionment in my own professional experience. I strongly believe that companies need to invest back in their employees by cross training them. This would allow them to adapt to emerging and influential technologies with far better success rate than when they do without any investment in their employees.

 

The question for this blogpost number 7 is very interesting and goes as follows: Evaluating emerging technologies; influential technologies and the future. When I think of emerging technologies, I go back to early aughts when social media sites like Facebook and YouTube came on the scene. It is safe to say that those two sites have fundamentally changed the internet and how we consume media. For me one technology that I keep going back to which I strongly believe will help move enterprises forward is any variant of a low code platform. My personal favorite being Microsoft’s Power Platform.

With the advent of gig economy, and the added changes caused by the pandemic companies are moving away from the conventional model of in-house development shops. Fewer and fewer companies are retaining and in-house development team and instead opting for COTS solutions or outsourced model of development. In such a fluid environment, Power Apps provides the companies the opportunities to enable and empower citizen developers within the enterprise.

I have cited this example before in one my blogs and this is something which astonishes me every time, I read it. A security guard at Heathrow airport Samit Saini used the Power Apps to build an app from scratch which helped his team save 288 hours of manual data entry. This story in itself is amazing, Samit had no prior IT experience and he used the Power Apps platform to build a functional app which solved a major problem. The only issue I see with wider acceptance of Power Apps is Micrsoft’s complex licensing regime. Nevertheless, enterprises would be well served to introduce their workforce to low code platforms. This will encourage people to learn a new skill and also help resolve problems they face in their day-to-day routine.

In the last blog post, I talked about what the business architecture role entailed. I also cited what I thought was a succinct explanation of the role provided by William Ulrich. By reading the role description alone, you would think it has no interplay with technology. However, business architecture is not to be seen in isolation but as a piece of the puzzle for an enterprise architecture practice. Renee Biggs, in her article published on Redhat, notes that business architecture is a component of enterprise architecture.

Many enterprise architecture groups fixate on technology alone and fail to align the business strategy and technology. There is a definite case to be made for technology driving business strategy, and Gartner does label those EA practices as highly integrated. However, to get to that point, enterprise architecture must ensure that it first aligns with business strategy. Although there is no BA role where I work, I am starting to believe that a business architect should be a required role in any enterprise architecture group.

EA practices cannot be mono-focused on the technical spectrum alone. Leaning heavily on the technical expertise of its solution, enterprise architects can put enterprise architecture on an island of irrelevancy. And I have learned situations where the EA practice was rolled entirely back, and architects let go. What are your thoughts on this topic? Please share them in the comments below.

Through this coursework and the prior classes I have taken so far, the spotlight on various architectural roles that have been noted has been quite illuminating. Up till this point, we have come to know about enterprise architect, solution architect, and now business architect roles. So, the question naturally arises of how the business architect role differs from the two other roles. One definition of a business architect comes from William Ulrich: the role of the business architect is to focus on gathering and synchronizing information about the business, which will serve as input to strategic planning and prioritization.

According to Blosch & Brand, one of the most important artifacts that a business architect produces and maintains is the business model of the enterprise. They define a business model as how an organization will make revenue from its operations. The business architecture role differs from the other two roles in its scope and focus. However, one interesting bit called out by Ulrich is that it is not the business architect’s job to create missing models or documents.

With that all being said, in my professional career, I have seen some instances of the business architect role advertised in job listings. However, in my organization, there is no business architect role. In fact, in my past interactions with companies, I have never come across a business architect. What are your thoughts on this role? Does your enterprise have a dedicated business architect role? And what does this person do? Please share in the comments below.

Cyber security has been an essential aspect of every IT organization, especially since the advent of the internet. However, the impact on cyber security since the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic has been something to behold. According to some studies, cybercrime has risen 600% due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That is a staggering figure by any measure. It puts a spotlight directly on the security architecture practices of small and large companies.

According to Gartner, establishing a world-class security program typically takes three to five years in large enterprises. However, COVID has sped that timeline; 2020 and 2021 saw double-digit increases in cybersecurity budgets, and even though it has come down to 6% in 2023, cybersecurity is still a critical component of an IT organization. 

With this week’s subject around security architecture, I will share some news stories about cyber security here. Number 1: hack of LastPass, a password manager solution. Although LastPass disclosed the Aug 2022 hack at the time, it did not provide additional details till December 2022. This was a major turnoff for many customers, including myself, who dropped their services. Number 2: crypto gangs hijacking of YouTube channels and scamming people by selling them fraudulent crypto. You must watch this video from famous tech YouTuber Linus Sebastian to understand how these hacks were perpetrated.

Security Architecture, in a larger scope, applies to enterprise-grade best practices. However, you would be best served also to use basic security practices in your personal tech space. The two examples above speak to how a company failed to prevent an attack and then erred in communicating with its customers in time, hurting its financial bottom line. And a tech YouTuber who fell victim to the same attack vector as the larger enterprise. Let me know how you practice cybersecurity safety at work and in your domain.

According to Internation Data Corporation, worldwide security investments will grow 12.1% in 2023 to $219 Billion. That is a staggering figure but will probably continue to grow to an even larger figure year in and year out. And that may still not be enough to prevent cyber attacks, which have become more numerous and sophisticated in their approach. The move to digital transformation has created and exposed additional threat surfaces that bad actors can attack. Companies must employ newer strategies to educate and engage employees concerning such threats.

The ever-changing nature of the threat means that security architecture has become an even more critical aspect of modern organizations. According to Clark and Lynas, Security architecture is the art and science of designing and supervising the construction of business systems that are free from danger and safe from attack. Organizations, including mine, have moved to set up a dedicated cyber security organization within the bigger IT organization.

One of the approaches my company’s cyber security group devised is to help instill best practices related to security architecture across the enterprise. This was instituted by inviting individual contributors from different IT teams, training them in security basics, and designating them as security champions. This would allow security best practices to bake into each project, whether big or small. With threats evolving at a breakneck pace, what are some of your company’s best practices to harden and augment its security architecture? Leave a comment below.

As I read through the lesson 04 material, one particular term piqued my interest: value proposition. Investopedia defines value proposition as a concise statement of the benefits a company delivers to customers who buy its products or services. According to Gartner, there are three design patterns for value propositions: change the value proposition, expand the value proposition, and improve the value proposition.

In the same article, Gartner provided examples of Porsche and VW, which embarked on expanding and changing their value propositions, respectively. Porsche started a subscription service, a unique idea for a car manufacturer and probably never tried before, and VW started its digital logistics platform called RIO. I can only imagine the technology architecture changes required to address such a change in value proposition.

Similarly to the two companies noted in the Gartner article, I recalled two more prominent examples of such value proposition changes: Amazon and Netflix. Amazon realized that its logistic partners could not match the demands of its customers and moved to establish a logistics department quickly. And Netflix, which mailed its last DVD just a few days ago, went from shipping physical media to one of the largest streaming platforms in a few years.

All these changes and expansions in the value proposition force rapid changes in enterprises’ technical architecture and digital transformation calculus. I find the switch in value proposition extremely interesting. Let me know your thoughts. Has your company experienced such a change in the value proposition, and how did it address those changes?

 

Cloud computing is not a new concept anymore. Two of the biggest cloud providers, AWS and Azure, have been around for 17 and 13 years, respectively. Cloud computing is ever so ubiquitous, and according to a survey by RightScale, cloud adoption was 91% in 2019. The cloud can be considered one of our times’ most fundamental disrupting technologies. What I find interesting is that, unlike most other technologies, the cloud has not faced the same headwinds as other disrupting technologies. As noted in this WSJ article, adopting new technology is sometimes painstakingly slow for many domains.

My own company found that to be competitive in defense contracting, it had to realign its technology infrastructure architecture. And without being in the decision-making circle, I can safely guess that the pandemic played a substantial part in moving the executive leadership in that direction. This seemingly was the case for most organizations, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella noted the fast pace of digital transformation at the onset of the pandemic in 2020.

The move towards a quick digital transformation brings its own set of challenges. My organization started its digital transformation in late 2020 to become future-fit. It has gone through growing pains, specifically with rearchitecting the network to manage capacity and cost. Companies must invest in team skill-building and team member rotation opportunities with ever-complex technology infrastructure architecture methodologies such as multi-cloud hybrid architecture. Let me know your thoughts. Has your enterprise started its digital transformation journey, and how is it facing the evolving challenges?

One of the overarching themes that quickly gets established when reading the Gartner essays on data/information architecture is their collective emphasis on creating new data-centric roles. With as much data being generated and collected by enterprises across different market segments it would behoove the enterprises to take Gartner’s advice seriously. For context, 2020 Seagate’s ‘Rethink Data’ report projected enterprise data collection to increase at a 42.2 percent annual growth rate. The more confounding data point noted in the same report was how 68% Of data available to businesses went unleveraged.

The idea behind the creation of these new data roles is to open streams of data locked inside the enterprise. This data is present within the enterprise but siloed under different business units. In addition to standing up the data roles and creating cross-organizational teams, Gartner also advises implementing a robust governance regime that is agile, flexible, and adaptive.

In my enterprise, the IT leadership has invested in various data-centric policies. Which includes employing a data warehousing lead alongside a dedicated data analytics team. However, unlike Gartner’s suggestion of having a CDO, the team rolls up to a manager who does not focus on data only. Let me know how your enterprise deals with data. Does it have data-centric roles and governance built around the use of data? Share your thoughts below.

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On a similar topic, WWE (the wrestling promotion) recently became part of TKO holdings. An unfortunate side effect of these mergers is the large number of jobs that get cut or consolidated. One of the casualties of this merger was WWE’s director of enterprise master data & governance, Amanda Bloom. Ms. Bloom posted a message on her LinkedIn profile. This message covers most of the topics we have read for L03. I wanted to share it here as an interesting side note.

 

 

While reading the L03 material, one of the Gartner research papers discussed data literacy. This term caught my attention, not because I heard it for the first time, but because of how it encapsulated the state of many enterprises’ workforce. And the day-to-day struggle of those tasked with maintaining, curating, and, most importantly, cleaning the data. In my own experience, I have encountered many datasets with invalid values and sometimes incorrect formatting. And periodically, spending countless hours cleaning up those dataset(s).

As enterprises evolve and legacy applications are scaffolded with new functionalities, the data inconsistencies can compound unless the solution is architected correctly. And this is where the term data literacy comes to the fore. In the same article, Gartner describes data literacy as the ability to read, write, and communicate data in context, including understanding data sources and constructs, analytical methods and techniques applied, and the ability to describe the use-case application and resulting value.

The question then arises: how do you increase data literacy in your team, business unit, or enterprise? One of the most effective Gratner’s suggestions involves establishing a communication platform that includes, for instance, a data dictionary and a business glossary to raise your organization’s data literacy level. According to Atlan, a data dictionary is a collection of metadata such as object name, data type, size, classification, and relationships with other data assets. A data dictionary acts as a reference guide on a dataset.

Establishing an enterprise-wide data dictionary can alleviate the overall data literacy of an enterprise. A centralized reference guide can also gradually improve data entry errors, which, according to HBR, can take up to 80% of data scientists’ time to clean up. With that being said, what is your enterprise’s data literacy like, share your thoughts below. I will leave you with this very apt meme shared by one of my coworkers during one of the projects we worked on.

P.S. I could not reliably find the source of this meme which is why I am sharing the image without attribution since it has been shared across multiple posts.