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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

This week’s reading material was particularly pertinent as I read through and tried to understand what application architecture is in the context of EA. The Gartner essays were especially thematically consistent in that they want enterprises to rethink their application architecture strategy. And employ three core strategies to affect change.

According to Wikipedia, Applications Architecture is the science and art of ensuring the suite of applications being used by an organization to create the composite application is scalable, reliable, available, and manageable. Gartner’s advice for realizing this goal is employing a three-pronged approach. Firstly, move away from a project-driven to a product-driven application architecture; secondly, use a mesh app and service architecture (MASA) alongside an API platform strategy.

The Product-driven architecture calls for an agile mindset where products are developed based on user needs, market research, and iterative feedback loops. In his WSJ article, Mike Kersten calls upon enterprises to break from the front-loaded, milestone-based, archaic project-based approach and adapt to agile-based product management. However, Mike Kersten acknowledges that changing from long-held assumptions can be challenging. Nevertheless, by employing the product-driven approach, teams can address customer feedback quickly and help reduce technical debt faster.

In addition to the product-driven agile mindset, the two other strategic changes Gartner advised about are MASA and API platform strategy. Both strategies combined envision productized APIs abstracting multigrain services while serving internal and external customers. However, in all of this excitement, what is lost is the reality that Gartner also acknowledges: a lack of competency and skills that can fulfill these goals for an enterprise.

Not only is the competency and skills hard to come by, but another significant impediment to having a productized API portfolio is the business units’ lack of interest in sharing their data. What complicates the issue is the security requirements of certain enterprises like mine, which many API management platforms are not mature enough to fulfill. Ultimately, I agree with Gartner’s suggestion to employ the three-pronged strategy to create a scalable, reliable, available, and manageable application architecture. Tell me what you think. Is your enterprise already using these strategies or some of them? Please share your thoughts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading all the Lesson 01 material, I could not help but compare each scenario and technology noted in subsequent articles to how technology is perceived in different business environments. And how digital disruption affects different types of businesses, and some companies may be better equipped to face such a disruption. I will come back to this specific point later in my blog. The first essay in the series of reading material was from McKinsey’s aptly named Finding Your Digital Sweet Spot. The gist of the article is how some businesses may be better suited to take the route of cost reductions over investing in a digital strategy. Reading this article with the hindsight of having experienced a global pandemic firsthand was quite interesting. One of the more interesting aspects of this essay was how the authors did not see a point in investing in digital strategy for grocery and apparel stores. Knowing how the pandemic changed every industry’s digital calculus. McKinsey could not have been more wrong on this front. I do want to note that I wasn’t very enthused about reading an essay from McKinsey, even in an academic setting. With its litany of scandals, McKinsey’s reputation precedes it. Most recently, it was found guilty and paid a fine over its involvement in the opioid crisis. So, my opinion is admittedly jaundiced.

A similar theme ran through the Gartner essays, which were dated since most were published before or around the COVID-19 pandemic. Each piece detailed various technologies that could help businesses overcome stagnation, plan for, and face digital disruption. One of the technology trends described in Gartner’s 2019 essay is investing in an API platform strategy. I see a definite use case for this strategy in my enterprise. Productizing APIs, publishing them, and building governance around them would create new data streams that would help drive business intelligence. However, the siloed nature of different business units and the tendency to gatekeep the data may prevent enterprises from achieving this goal. This seems to be a maxim for many enterprises. I would like to hear your enterprise’s strategy for a robust API platform.

Another salient point in Gartner’s Digital Disruption and Innovation Primer essay was the need to set up a dedicated organization to focus on disrupting technologies. This strategy can help enterprises plan for future digital disruptions. Suppose the executive leadership is willing to invest in such an office. They can steer the enterprise through potential disruption and remain ahead of the digital curve. As noted above, some enterprises are better suited to face and plan for digital transformation. Companies with core IT competencies like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Red Hat are better equipped to face digital disruptions. However, this should not preclude other businesses from trying to be proactive and constitute a transformation office, which would help them immensely.

Gartner describes disruption as having three dimensions.

1. Scale
2. Reach
3. Richness

These three dimensions must be assessed across society, industry, business, and technology. However, most companies fail to comprehend these disruptions. As the WSJ article notes, humans have a better time understanding linear change but struggle with exponential disruption. It is akin to my struggle with the concept of time and space and how time specifically can be relative. My comprehension struggles aside; this article very aptly calls out enterprises’ refusal to address the soft layers while trying to force digital transformation. Similarly to Gartner, WSJ also asks the executives to invest time in ideating and taking a break from going through the motions of IT. In short, digital transformation requires enterprises to invest in developing skills and competencies. In addition, the enterprises should invest in a transformation office whose core objective is to ideate and project a future roadmap for success by incorporating disruptive technologies.

Ultimately, I want to summarize by saying that I agree with Gartner’s core points, which I have listed above. I do believe that companies that want to grow should examine their digital strategy, irrespective of their size and stature. The high cost of entry may deter many small-sized businesses from employing a digital strategy. Nevertheless, they should still investigate in some capacity to broach this subject. The pandemic has shifted the pace of this discussion; online pickup is a norm for almost all retailers, irrespective of industry. There are also marked improvements in the process flow for picking up an item from a store. Digital disruption will continue to manifest in different shapes and forms; having a positive and willing mindset is the only way to manage your small or big business through such a disruption. Let me know your thoughts on how you think enterprises should manage/face digital disruption.