Digital Disruption and Stack Overview & Cloud Technologies Influence

Enterprise architecture stack 

All businesses must deal with extreme pressure for immediate change. In the mid to long term, organizations are at high risk of not surviving if they cannot adapt and make necessary changes to keep up with the market competition. The business’s ecosystem have changed dramatically due to various factors, and the status quo of continuing the business, in the same manner, is no longer sustainable due to disruptive technologies such as digitalization, cognitive services, and robotics. People are being forced to change from task-based workers to become creative and knowledge based workers who can externalize the knowledge and design methods for the technology to the task. The age-old standard business model has irrevocably changed, altering how the business operates within its ecosystem. It is extremely hard for companies and people to address the new reality of human cognitive demand and the associated financial challenges.

For organizations to make a significant step forward to effectively deal with people, process, and technology aspects and internal and external threats while operating with their financial and regulatory constraints, they must have a successful EA initiative. The practice of architecture has always driven human endeavor. However, it is currently in turmoil due to a lack of stakeholder alignment, perception, and priorities. A structured EA helps an enterprise establish a strategy and business planning which drives the technology implementations. Technology must not drive business and strategy planning. Furthermore, EA helps align stakeholders in enterprises to achieve business outcomes driven by strategy and aided by technology. Enterprise Architecture is accomplished through a management program and analysis and design methods that are both scalable and repeatable at various levels of scope.

As a management program, it provides a strategic alignment that connects the goals, activities, resource governance and implantation, financial control and configuration management and resource lifecycle approach to development and management. As an analysis and design method, enterprise architecture provides a framework, analysis/design method and an artifact set, current and future views, Management Plan, and a plan to transition from the current state to the future architecture.

References:

Ross, J., & Beath, C. (2020) Why You — Yes, You — Need Enterprise Architecture. MIT Sloan Management Review. August

Phase D: Technology Architecture. Retrieved from https://pubs.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf90-doc/m/chap12.html

 

Cloud technology influence

An uneven response to the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that organizations must be agile, robust, and follow security practices to operate effectively in unanticipated crises. It requires the ability to engage customers and employees in physical and digital domains seamlessly. Many, if not most organizations, fall short of this journey partly because the current events have been extremely challenging and even painful as various industries and enterprises reach and adapt.

On the bright side, where there are challenges lies the opportunity. Recognizing the possibility and necessity to transform, over 72% of the executives surveyed by IBM indicated that they are using this time to dramatically accelerate their company’s cloud migration journey and advance specific transformation initiatives that previously had encountered resistance. The there key takeaways from an analysis based survey by IBM Institute for Business Value in cooperation with Oxford Economics include,

• As organizations progress on their journey to the cloud, the ability to integrate multiple cloud environments becomes essential.
• The revenue impact of cloud investments for companies can be amplified by more than 16 times when orchestrated as an end-to-end reinvention of the enterprise.
• The more hybrid and multi-cloud is tightly coupled with enterprise transformation, the more significant the revenue impact of all technology investments to the business.

References:

Clouds next leap: Cloud-driven digital plays can create transformational business value. Retrieved from https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/report/cloud-transformation

IBM Study: C-Suite Executives Declare One-Vendor Approach to Cloud is Dead. Retrieved from https://newsroom.ibm.com/2021-10-28-IBM-Study-C-Suite-Executives-Declare-One-Vendor-Approach-to-Cloud-is-Dead