What comes first, enterprise architecture or digital transformation?
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Chair and Professor, Startup CTO in Education2 years ago
I am pretty sure enterprise architecture comes before digital transformation. But it can be vice versa. Digital transformation is broad and you can start small, such as transfer invoicing and disbursement payment first, then vendor management, and design documents, etc. Solutions Architect in Software2 years ago
Enterprise Architecture; Transformation is the necessary set of processes that might be caused by the architecture in the first place. Otherwise, transformation is just a set of activities for the sake of activities, not to achieve specific goals.
Chief Technology Officer in Healthcare and Biotech2 years ago
Digital transformation. You need to know what you are wanting to achieve, and what the company objectives are, before defining your solution and approach.Director of Engineering in Services (non-Government)2 years ago
They go hand in hand. Few architectures will readily support digitally transformed customer experiences and business processes.In my experience, starting with a view of what a digitally transformed employee experience and customer experience looks like is very helpful in determining what the enterprise architecture needs to accomodate and enable.
With that vision in mind, it is easy to do a gap analysis between the current architecture, an architecture that your incumbent technology and process providers could potentially support, as well as the possibilities provided by an entirely refreshed architecture.
Having clear sight of these three perspectives (and the process you go through in gaining this clarity) will greatly help you identify advocates, detractors and those who are indifferent to the transformation - be it board members, senior executives, peers, direct reports, existing suppliers, potential suppliers and industry regulators.
Combined, you will be in a position to rapidly develop an options paper and a (high-level) business case for your chosen approach.
Organize yourself around the initiatives that matter most to the board and, therefore, the leadership of a company. That defines what you should be doing as a firm: How do you acquire more customers? How do you retain customers? Or under what conditions are you running at peak performance? Once you’ve defined the most important initiatives, decide what you currently have that enables you to address these faster and where there are gaps. If they are manifested as IT gaps, you can go off-path and build, or you can buy some tools — I usually decide to do a build. If it’s a process gap, you can readdress or remap some of your processes, both internal and external — this could include people and culture.