Disruptive times require resilient, forward-looking enterprise architectures. Don't let the wrong framing undermine your organization's ability to achieve its current and future goals.

Enterprise architecture provides the foundation for a successful business IT initiative. When properly designed and implemented, enterprise architecture helps business leaders achieve their goals, enabling organizations to become more responsive, efficient, and competitive.

Unfortunately, just a few common mistakes can prevent an enterprise architecture from meeting its designers' expectations. In fact, over time, a flawed enterprise architecture can lead a business in entirely the wrong direction.

When developing or updating your enterprise architecture, take a step back and make sure it doesn't fall into any of the following seven pitfalls.

1. EA work does not align with business needs

Business leaders may design a coherent, detailed architecture, but unless it focuses on real-world business needs, it will not succeed in the long run.

Before planning begins, Ginna Raahauge, chief information officer at communications infrastructure service provider Zayo, recommends gathering an enterprise's most impactful use cases to stress test existing enterprise architectures for potential vulnerabilities. Make sure the use cases are relevant, she advises. "If you have an order accuracy challenge, [for example], it's important to think about what's causing it both on the front end and back end, and how a change in architecture can fix it."

Raahauge believes that enterprise architecture is never really done. "It's alive," she said. Raahauge recommends revisiting enterprise architecture at least every five years. "As technology moves faster and faster, we need to be able to survive five years of technological change," she explained.

2. Not taking a customer-first approach

When designing an enterprise architecture, it's important to align the design plan with a customer-centric approach, says Phillip Hattingh, vice president at business and IT consulting firm Capgemini. Customer-centric goals and outcome KPIs should be enabled throughout the design process, facilitating a true omnichannel customer journey that addresses digital and physical interactions, he said. "How the design will achieve the desired outcomes of the organization should be clear and well communicated to support a successful transformation."

A customer-centric approach to enterprise architecture design marks a major change from the traditional product-centric model. "A customer-first approach will challenge traditional models and has the potential to lead to changes in operating models in the future," Hattingh noted. "Organizations can also lose market competitiveness without adopting customer-centric design."

3. Neglect of focusing on core goals and capabilities

An enterprise architecture that fails to centralize core business goals and capabilities is bound to create or retain silos.

Jonathan Bennett, Adobe's former chief technology director for enterprise digital government solutions, warns: "When different offices and departments encounter the same challenges and deploy solutions that often overlap, they can get bogged down in redundant, inefficient systems. , thereby impeding progress toward business goals.” USDA Architects. "Additionally, once workflows are siled, it becomes increasingly difficult to implement any enterprise architecture."

Benett said he has seen the devastating effects of silos in his work as an enterprise architect for government agencies. "Offices that have the budget and human capital to solve current problems will develop their own applications and methodologies, rather than building platforms for applications that serve multiple purposes and meet cross-agency needs," he said. "When offices and departments work separately, they tend to resist downsizing ... because they lack visibility into the benefits of overall business goals."

An effective way to dismantle siled enterprise architectures is to invite teams representing key business functions to catalog all their digital tools, including apps, websites, and workforce management programs. Then include enterprise-wide processes and policies. Once this all-encompassing catalog is created, gaps and strengths can be identified and built on, Benett said. "From there, a capability-driven business architecture can begin to emerge," he noted.

4. Put technology ahead of agility and business goals

Jonathan Cook, chief technology officer at healthcare data and software company Arcadia, says it's easy to get caught up in a technology-centric worldview when developing an enterprise architecture and lose sight of the business value model. "Business needs are constantly changing, and as technology leaders and professionals, we need to support, enable and accelerate that change."

When blinded or constrained by a technology-centric outlook, business leaders may find themselves caught up in arguing the superiority of various technology approaches instead of focusing on how to support current and future business needs. "If we fail to provide a flexible, resilient structure, we risk preventing our organization from competing effectively," Cook warned. "Over the past 18 months of this pandemic, we've seen businesses that can quickly adapt to changing market conditions survive and even thrive."

5. Get stuck in the moment

An enterprise architecture developed without foreseeing future growth needs may ultimately fail. "Without a roadmap, you're going to run into limitations in creating efficiencies, and in supporting business goals," says Liz Tluchowski, CIO/CISO at insurance brokerage World Insurance. "When you find that what you've built You’ll also face the added expense of reinventing the wheel when it doesn’t meet the operational needs of your business.”

Tluchowski recommends keeping an open mind when building any system that may require scalability as your enterprise grows and/or your business needs change. "Use platforms and services known for their open architecture, because technology is always changing and even if you have a plan, there are a lot of unpredictable things."

6. Security breaches

As the cyber threat landscape has evolved, enterprise architectures have been forced to change over the past few years. "In the past, security was an add-on or an afterthought," said Chuck Everette, director of cybersecurity advocacy at cybersecurity technology firm Deep Instinct. "Security is now at the core and front of enterprise architecture and design," he noted. "Everything else are built on or around it. "

Not including security at the beginning of the enterprise architecture design phase is a dangerous mistake because systems, applications and data can be compromised, warns Bruce Young, director of the cybersecurity management graduate program at Harrisburg Tech. "Cyber threats are constantly increasing and successful cyber-attacks on organizations occur every day, so it is imperative to incorporate security into the enterprise architecture process from the design stage."

Fundamental security considerations must take place during the design and planning stages, as well as testing and validation before final signoff, said Everette, who recommends a security-by-design approach to enterprise architecture development. "Security-by-design enforces design priorities based on business risk, value, and impact of breaches and vulnerabilities."

7. Pursuit of perfection

Most talented people, both IT and business, want to build the perfect thing. While perfection may be an admirable goal, it's not a particularly good pursuit when developing enterprise architectures, especially when future-proofing them or building at scale.

Laura Thomson, vice president of engineering at cloud computing service provider Fastly, explained: "It's certainly important, but over-spinning can lead to a lot of problems, mainly all kinds of over-building and over-architecting."

Thomson warns that building the perfect structure for the business that management hopes to have in five years will lead to a significant increase in complexity and cost. "It delays delivery deadlines, makes systems build slower, more prone to errors and outages, and drives up costs."

Thomson recommends aiming for a good architecture, not a perfect architecture. "A perfect system doesn't exist, " she said. Get 80% of the short-term solutions that bring value to the business. "You can and should improve iteratively," Thomson added.

This article: https://architect.pub/7-enterprise-architecture-mistakes-avoid
Discussion: Knowledge Planet [Chief Architect Circle] or add WeChat trumpet [ca_cto] or add QQ group [792862318]
No public	【jiagoushipro】【Super Architect】 Brilliant graphic and detailed explanation of architecture methodology, architecture practice, technical principles, and technical trends. We are waiting for you, please scan and pay attention.
WeChat trumpet	[ca_cea] Community of 50,000 people, discussing: enterprise architecture, cloud computing, big data, data science, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, security, full-stack development, DevOps, digitalization.
QQ group	[285069459] In-depth exchange of enterprise architecture, business architecture, application architecture, data architecture, technical architecture, integration architecture, security architecture. And various emerging technologies such as big data, cloud computing, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, etc. Join the QQ group to share valuable reports and dry goods.
video number	[Super Architect] Quickly understand the basic concepts, models, methods, and experiences related to architecture in 1 minute. 1 minute a day, the structure is familiar.
knowledge planet	[Chief Architect Circle] Ask big names, get in touch with them, or get private information sharing.
Himalayas	[Super Architect] Learn about the latest black technology information and architecture experience on the road or in the car.	[Intelligent moments, Mr. Architecture will talk to you about black technology]
knowledge planet	Meet more friends, workplace and technical chat.	Knowledge Planet【Workplace and Technology】
LinkedIn	Harry	https://www.linkedin.com/in/architect-harry/
LinkedIn group	LinkedIn Architecture Group	https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14209750/
Weibo‍‍	【Super Architect】	smart moment‍
Bilibili	【Super Architect】
Tik Tok	【cea_cio】Super Architect
quick worker	【cea_cio_cto】Super Architect
little red book	[cea_csa_cto] Super Architect
website	CIO (Chief Information Officer)	https://cio.ceo
website	CIOs, CTOs and CDOs	https://cioctocdo.com
website	Architect practical sharing	https://architect.pub
website	Programmer cloud development sharing	https://pgmr.cloud
website	Chief Architect Community	https://jiagoushi.pro
website	Application development and development platform	https://apaas.dev
website	Development Information Network	https://xinxi.dev
website	super architect	https://jiagou.dev
website	Enterprise technical training	https://peixun.dev
website	Programmer's Book	https://pgmr.pub
website	developer chat	https://blog.developer.chat
website	CPO Collection	https://cpo.work
website	chief security officer	https://cso.pub ‍
website	CIO cool	https://cio.cool
website	CDO information	https://cdo.fyi
website	CXO information	https://cxo.pub