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.

 

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.

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.

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?

 

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.

 

 

One of the more critical systems an enterprise can have is enterprise resource planning, commonly referred to as an ERP. Bart Perkins explains ERP as an integrated software application system that manages day-to-day business processes and operations across finance, human resources, procurement, distribution, supply chain, and other functions. Gartner takes it a step further, calls ERP a strategy instead of a single application, and encourages enterprises to employ a composable approach to ERP instead of locking into a single vendor application.

Gartner defines composable ERP as an adaptive technology strategy that enables an enterprise’s foundational administrative and operational digital capabilities to keep up with business change. This strategy delivers a core of composable applications and, as a service, software platforms that are highly configurable, interoperable, and flexible to adapt to modern technology. This is where the rubber meets the road: developing composable applications, including microservices, plugins, and APIs.

This leads to a loosely coupled architecture and a new way of developing systems in addition to the three modules of composable applications listed above. Low-code application platforms such as Power Apps should also be part of the same discussion if they are not already. With this new composable way of systems development, enterprises should encourage citizen development. And look towards implementing an API strategy with a mediated API layer to integrate different applications. However, with a composable application architecture comes the need for governance.  Enterprises must have effective governance to reduce compliance and financial risks.

Even though I am a big proponent of LCAP, like Power Platform, the licensing regime implemented by Microsoft makes it somewhat challenging to have an effective citizen development corps. But I still firmly believe that Power Apps has endless potential and is a great new way of systems development. According to Gartner, by 2026, developers outside IT departments will account for at least 80% of users of low-code development tools, up from 60% in 2021. Let me know your thoughts on system development. Does your enterprise have a composable architecture and LCAP, and do you use the Power Platform yourself?

With my professional journey navigating through a digital transformation project going through the ebbs. I have been lucky to observe how the various cloud technologies play out in real time and how my enterprise has made decisions pertaining to digital transformation. Decisions include reducing the on-premise footprint, fine-tuning the costing model, and moving towards a software-defined WAN networking architecture. Cloud technologies are influencing every aspect of the enterprise. Every decision has a cloud element, from SaaS and PaaS to IaaS.

I recall ten years ago, during my first graduate coursework, writing a paper on relatively new cloud technologies. One of the research items that stuck with me was how, during the 2010 Black Friday holiday, Target leveraged the cloud to prevent its website from crashing. Whereas the cost of managing an on-prem infrastructure may be lower than using a hybrid model. What cloud technologies offer that on-prem infrastructure cannot is resiliency and elasticity.

Gartner publishes their hype cycle for application architecture and development research essay, I believe, each year. And they project various technologies through aptly named phases. In their 2020 essay, Gartner detailed a list of cloud technologies and how some were peaking and other was plateauing. The most interesting bit of this research piece was Gartner’s declaration about AI-augmented development and how it was off the hype cycle. The article reads like you could be reading it in August 2023, when the Chat GPT hype cycle has cooled off somewhat. However, augmented development may go through some lulls but will stick in the long run.

With all that being said, there is one cloud technology I am personally very excited about. #1 Low-code application platforms (LCAP) like PowerApps. PowerApps will encourage more and more citizen developers to build functional, feature-rich apps. And with each passing release, Microsoft is incorporating more complex feature-rich capabilities into the ecosystem which it calls Power Platform. I think Power Platform is one of the more enabling cloud technologies. A few years ago, I read about Samit Saini, a security officer at Heathrow Airport who built an app on PowerApps without any development experience. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadalla recognized Samit’s achievement, and you can watch him interview Samit in this video.

In the end, I believe cloud technologies will continue to evolve. The executive leaders are responsible for empowering transformation teams who can choose from the array of cloud technologies and pick the right tools and applications for their respective businesses. I would also strongly urge everyone to check Microsoft’s Power Platform, especially if your business has an existing agreement with Microsoft in place for O365. If you are already an avid user; please share your thoughts and how you use the Power Platform in your day-to-day activities.