What is your approach to aligning Enterprise Architecture with urgent business demands?
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The first approach to solving this problem is realizing that EA's role is changing from technology-focused to enterprise-wide. EA must include existing company activities and IT systems and adapt to unexpected developments. EA goes beyond IT system design to allow strategic business change.
Businesses must realize that flexibility and responsiveness do not contradict stability in EA. Business needs may appear to conflict with enterprise system stability and resilience. A successful EA methodology promotes system stability and adaptability to meet business demands.
EA-business alignment isn't a one-size-fits-all method either. A thorough strategy may include enhancing communication and cooperation between business and IT stakeholders, building a culture of adaptation, exploiting new technology, and being proactive rather than reactive to changes. EA must change its perspective from IT-centric to business-centric to become a proactive business influencer rather than a passive responder.
We outlined a comprehensive enterprise architecture and then aligned it with a very detailed software development life cycle (SDLC) with its own associated set of templates and SOPs. This was supplemented by a refined DevOps CI/CD pipeline to automate the deployment
Understand the urgent business demands, Evaluate the current enterprise architecture, Prioritize business demands, Define a target architecture, Develop a roadmap, Engage stakeholders
Refer the strategic goal and update it, develop tactical and operational plans to accomplish the changes needed by business. Risk management shall continue during the entire change
One of the biggest challenges to EA is urgent business requests with very strong business cases, but the solution does not align with the EA policies.
This is where it gets very tricky, and the CIO needs to navigate carefully to find a compromise to fill the business need and stay aligned with the EA.