Can you do Enterprise Architecture?

If you old enough you may have seen the episode from "Keeping up the appearance", where Hyacinth goes for a ride.

It's very obvious when you are sitting on a horse if you can ride or not, and how well you can do it.

Many persons say that they can do Enterprise architecture, but it's very often they end up in a situation where they say something, but can't deliver.

The critical question is how you can verify their compence in actual EA work, beforehand. Hint, TOGAF or SAFe certifications doesn’t hold any value to verify enterprise architecture competence.

At least I can give gentle directions to the horse when riding. For my knowledge of how to do Enterprise Architecture, see the my EA case study.

Directions

Last weekend, I volunteered to assist with parking at a local event, "Farmlife when grandpa was young."

In some sense, it was like to be an Enterprise Architect at work. I was showing the direction to the drivers with very clear hand signals.

However, at work the situation is much more difficult.

Here, I could safely assume that the drivers had driving licenses and know how to drive.

They had to pay for the parking with either cash or mobile payment. In Sweden, more or less everybody does this.

The parking lot was clearly marked, and nearby the entrance to fairc. If someone would park in the wrong place, there were some huge tractors that could tow away the vehicles.

Finally, the attendants all wanted to go there, so no hard feelings.

As a bonus, we had amazing sunny weather in early fall in southern Sweden.

With EA in large organizations, you can't expect the staff to have the necessary competence to do large transformations.

When and where to go is often unclear, and it often changes during the project.

Most people are reluctant to change, and not very eager to participate, so that is also a difference.

If the team members choose not to follow the directions, there are often no consequences.

A delicious icecream in the sun or a cramped office desk inside?

How generative AI impact your business strategy

The huge question very few talks about is IF and HOW generative AI will impacy your business strategy.

The answer from Copilot is rather generic, neither so much on strategy as in day to day operations.

Generative AI has the potential to significantly impact your business strategy in several ways:

1. Content Creation and Innovation: Generative AI can create new content, such as marketing materials, product descriptions, and even entire articles, which can save time and resources. It can also help in generating innovative ideas for new products or services¹.

2. Efficiency and Automation: By automating repetitive tasks, such as data entry, customer service responses, and report generation, generative AI can improve operational efficiency. This allows your team to focus on more strategic and creative tasks².

3. Personalization: Generative AI can analyze customer data to create personalized experiences, such as tailored marketing campaigns and customized product recommendations. This can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty¹.

4. Strategic Decision-Making: AI can provide insights and predictions based on large datasets, helping you make more informed strategic decisions. This includes market trends analysis, competitor analysis, and risk assessment³.

5. New Business Models: Generative AI can enable the creation of entirely new business models. For example, AI-driven platforms can offer personalized services or products that were not possible before³.

6. Competitive Advantage: Early adoption of generative AI can give your business a competitive edge by improving efficiency, enhancing customer experiences, and enabling innovation².

Me, as usual, I start with the business model canvas.

The first question is if your value proposition could be expanded with generative AI, and if this new value proposition is in the red or blue ocean.

Unless you sell services related to generative AI, I've got a very hard time to see how AI in it self is a value proposition to your customers. And if you would like to enter the game with your generative AI, it's a very red ocean today with all big tech players competing. I may be completely wrong, and not thinking enough outside the box.

What impact will AI have on your revenue streams? Probably nothing new here as subscriptions, etc is nothing new for most companies.

Can you reach new customer segments with generative AI? If you can lower the cost of existing value propositions, make them simpler to use, then you may grow your market to new customer segments.

Customer relations and channels are up next. Improved self-service should be the obvious case for generative AI, the next step after digitalization that all companies have succeded with. Depending on how we define channels for customer interaction, we may have an impact. The question is how much.

There is nothing like a free lunch, and generative AI will add to the cost structure. Question is if other cost will be lower, so we are up for classic business case calculations.

If generative AI is utterly important to our company, then it will be a key resource and/or provided by a key partner. Nothing odd in this respect.

Finally, key activity. Generative AI is not an activity, it's a tool that could improve your key activities, and here is the key question to which degree we can have the support and the cost benefits for those.

My conclusion is that for a huge majority of the organizations, generative AI will not impact the business strategy directly, but there may be an indirect impact that everbody need to assess.

In the end, can you offer better products and services, and/or a lower cost, than your competors? That's the important question.

For our film production company, the question is yes, generative AI & ML will impact, but you will not see it in the business model canvas.

Source: http://disruptivearchitecture.info/blog/2019/11/9/EA_Case_Study_-_Business_Model_Canvas.

A dear child has many names

You may call the role delivery architect, solution architect, program architect, enterprise architect or solution authority.

The important thing is not what you call the role but what you need to do in this role.

First of all, it’s end-to-end accountability for a large project or a program. With end-to-end accountability I mean both business and IT.

End-to-end

If your responsibility is end-to-end for technical part of a CRM implementation, you are missing a number of areas.

An example of a full end-to-end solution could be:

• Implementation of a CRM solution from one vendor

• Changes in existing IT-systems

• Integrations between internal and external IT-systems

• Data migration

• Changes to business operations

• Changes to IT-operations

Thus not only IT and often more than one technical solution.

Accountability

It’s your head as a guarantee for the solution to work. This means that you also have the power to say no, i.e. veto in the program. However, if the steering group say yes, when you say no, it’s their accountability.

With this role, you work together with the program manager, and you both participate in the steering group meetings.

Why is it needed?

If part the solution to work end-to-end includes any type of manual work, either in business or IT, or you have changes to existing systems, you have integrations to other systems, there is a risk that some of these parts of the whole go wrong and the chain is broken.

If you sell a product or a service, and can’t track the payments for the invoices you have, then you got a severe crisis.

Another example is when you manually enter products and prices in two different systems, one new and one old, and you miss something.

It could also be related to data, where the data format differs massively between the existing and the new systems. It could also be related to data quality, or the lack of thereof.

Question

Who is crazy enough to take this role?