Data is the new oil. You might have heard or read this but did you know that it is actually true. As the enterprise demand for data continues to skyrocket, business and IT leaders are still struggling to manage huge data sets and more importantly, extract actionable insights out of it. The worst part is that all that data management is not closely linked to business priorities, which complicates matters even more.
Despite having tons of data, they are not being able to make the right business decisions. So, what’s the solution? The solution is to create an enterprise architecture. With a solid enterprise architecture, you can not only understand enterprise data flow but can also identify and capitalize on data opportunities that are usually ignored.
Most importantly, it can also help your enterprise align your business and digital strategies so you can meet your data needs efficiently. You can even scale the process of data analysis, define roles and responsibilities to bring improvements to data flow processes.
Other benefits of having a robust enterprise architecture includes:
Innovation at departmental level
Strengthen your technology core by increasing the power of your technology infrastructure
Allows employees to focus on more value driven tasks.
Reduces risk exposure
Minimizes total cost of service ownership
Ensure optimal utilization of resources and prevent redundancies and duplications
Emphasis on making the most of current systems
In this article, you will learn about the step by step process you can adopt to create a minimum viable enterprise architecture.
How To Create a Minimum Viable Enterprise Architecture?
Here are four steps you can take to create a minimum viable enterprise architecture for your business.
Communicate Frequently
The first thing you need to do to create an enterprise architecture is to stay in touch with all the key stakeholders. This is important as it allows you to understand the pain points so you can develop an enterprise architecture which can solve these problems.
Joe Schulz, CIO of Carrier Global Corp looks at metrics like affect on employee productivity due to service outage and application quality to gauge the effectiveness of an enterprise architecture. He further adds, “We don’t look at enterprise architecture as a single group of people who are the gatekeepers, who are more theoretical in nature about how something should work,”
He focuses more on finding connections between ecosystems and the system capabilities. Additionally, he puts more emphasis on identifying gaps and minimizing redundancies. Other experts who get your google skillshop certification think that you should invest more time and energy in establishing trust and ensuring transparency and keep the stakeholders informed about the latest developments. Enterprise architects tend to struggle big time when they work in silos. This would not be the case if they build a strong relationship with all stakeholders.
Reduce Complexity
What really irks stakeholders is lengthy questionnaires and interviews that follow a particular template. If you really want desired results out of your enterprise architecture efforts, you will have to change that. Cut out all the fluff and only ask questions that are really necessary and provide you important information and useful feedback.
The best way to do that is to switch to a more simple and agile conversation method when communicating with business users. This can speed up the whole process from architecture reviews to submissions. Above all, it can increase the effectiveness of your processes as well.
Eliminate standards that don’t really matter or deliver value to your business. When conducting meetings, leave out topics that don’t bring any value and stay focused on the agenda. Focus on improving the visibility and control instead of wasting time and resources on improving other things. Buy cheap VPS server hosting and adopt processes that can help you avoid bottlenecks. When taking feedback, ask the respondents to visualize the final product and what features they want to see in it. This will make it easier for you to decide which processes and features you need to include and which ones to leave out.
Even when you are ready to roll out your enterprise architecture, you should have a specific plan that highlights all the milestones and specific steps you need to achieve your ultimate goal. Everything from revenue to user adoption rate, different stages of deployment to support processes should be clearly defined. The success of enterprise architecture depends upon how much value it can deliver to a particular customer. If your enterprise architecture struggles with value delivery, it kills the whole purpose of creating it in the first place. You don’t need to create an enterprise architecture for the sake of it as it is a total waste of resources.
Define Your Scope
One of the biggest mistakes enterprises make when creating a minimum viable enterprise architecture is that they ignore the word minimum viable and include everything in it. Due to this, their enterprise architecture quickly becomes outdated. Not only does it take more time to produce desired results but drastically reduces the chances of acquiring funding from business leaders. In order to define the scope of the project correctly, you need to have a holistic view. Start by focusing on areas that need most improvement and then take it from there. As a rule of thumb, you should target a minimum number of deliverables which can help you ensure timely delivery of products and services.
Implement Standards
By following design best practices and principles, you can reduce the time wasted on arguments related to which solution to adopt and which ones to avoid. Adopt solutions that facilitate reusability and create an architecture design pattern before creating it.
Yes, you can surely learn from architectures and standards in other areas such as cybersecurity, production management and deployment. This will give you an idea about how to create your own enterprise architecture by giving you a playbook you can follow. This can significantly minimize the time required to create an enterprise architecture.
What steps did you follow when creating an enterprise architecture for your business? Share it with us in the comments section below.
