CIOs often have a love-hate relationship with enterprise architecture. On the one hand, enterprise architects play a key role in selecting platforms, developing technical capabilities, and driving standards. Moreover, undertaking digital transformation and technology modernization programs without an architect can lead to delays, technical debt, higher costs, and security vulnerabilities.
On the other hand, enterprise architects often struggle to deliver business outcomes, and many CIOs find themselves communicating the function’s importance to executive stakeholders repeatedly.
In the State of Enterprise Architecture 2023, only 26% of respondents fully agreed that their enterprise architecture practice delivered strategic benefits, including improved agility, innovation opportunities, improved customer experiences, and faster time to market. All this while CIOs are under increased pressure to deliver more competitive capabilities, reduce security risks, connect AI with enterprise data, and automate more workflows — all areas where architecture disciplines have a direct role in influencing outcomes.
CIOs looking to deliver strategic benefits must rethink how they put enterprise architects to work within their digital transformation delivery models to ensure their recommended platforms, best practices, and standards gain adoption.
What agile leadership looks like
Redefining how architects collaborate with agile teams is one way to improve business-IT collaboration and outcomes. By adopting agile roles, enterprise architects can improve their ability to deliver against their specific goals and change executive perceptions.
Many organizations create program charters for strategic initiatives in which they define the program’s leadership roles and accountabilities. I recommend three primary roles: a product manager owning the vision, a delivery leader overseeing agile teams and implementation, and a program sponsor. The sponsor’s primary responsibility is to secure funding and justify the business value of the investment.
Beyond these three roles, many charters identify other program-level leadership roles that may not have direct responsibilities as agile team members. Two of these roles are relevant to enterprise architecture:
Expert advisors in technology and non-technology roles, including employees and outside consultants, who provide domain expertise to help agile teams plan and deliver capabilities;
Change agents who oversee change management activities and assign communication, evangelism, training, and other change-oriented responsibilities to agile teams, trainers, and business unit leaders.
How enterprise architects can find a transformational fit
Below are five agile roles CIOs should consider for their enterprise architects, each of which aligns with their typical architecture objectives.
1. Product manager over technical debt
“Best-in-class architects work in lockstep with self-organizing, agile teams to employ modernization programs that shift legacy point solutions and services into sound, robust cloud infrastructures,” says Jason Forget, president and CRO of Cockroach Labs. “They should be allergic to spaghetti architecture, prioritizing streamlined, efficient, and resilient systems instead.”
Mounting technical debt and extending the life of legacy systems are key risks CIOs should be paranoid about. The question is, how should CIOs assign ownership to this problem, require that technical debt’s risks are categorized, and ensure there’s a roadmap for implementing remediations?
One solution is to assign the responsibility to enterprise architects in a product management capacity. Product managers must define a vision statement that aligns with strategic and end-user needs, propose prioritized roadmaps, and oversee an agile backlog for agile delivery teams. Product managers then propose digital KPIs and other metrics highlighting the business benefits delivered.
By asking architects to assume a product management role, they have clear accountability to prioritize and deliver improvements to reduce technical debt. They also have a well-defined means for collaborating with agile development teams and can work with them to deliver a roadmap of improvements tied to technical debt remediations.
2. Delivery leader for extendable platforms
Should every devops team build their own CI/CD pipelines, configure their own infrastructure as code, and have a uniquely configured developer stack? Many organizations are adopting platform engineering practices where devops, dataops, business services, and other enabling computing practices are configured as platforms for agile teams to reuse and extend where required.
CIOs investing in platform engineering should assign a sponsor, product manager, delivery leader, and agile teams to these programs to develop and enhance platform engineering tools and practices. Enterprise architects who have a software development background are ideal candidates to assume the delivery leader role and can steer teams toward developing platforms with baked-in security, performance, usability, and other best practices.
“Unified platforms streamline enterprise operations, enabling faster product development and an enhanced user experience,” says Andrew Bonham, senior director and senior distinguished engineer at Capital One. “Platforms also enable reusable capabilities, effectively reducing duplication and lowering the total cost of ownership. Ultimately, a unified platform-based ecosystem can drive innovation and technological advancements quickly and efficiently — both essential to an organization’s digital transformation.”
One area enterprise architects can focus on is developing self-service cloud infrastructure for devops and data science teams. “They must collaborate closely with engineering, operations, and security teams to design, implement, and govern an enterprise-wide consumption of cloud computing, making resources instantly consumable by developers and data scientists,” says Haseeb Budhani, co-founder and CEO of Rafay. “Enterprise architects set up the guardrails by defining the architecture, governance policies, and self-service interfaces to help their developers innovate faster and more efficiently.”
Delivering platforms may be easy for enterprise architects, so they must also understand that adoption by agile teams is a key success criterion.
“Enterprise architects in this new platform engineering capacity need to enable self-organizing teams across business units and regions to source pre-approved artifacts from a central hub quickly,” says Kevin Cochrane, CMO of Vultr. “Teams can then assemble the artifacts rapidly using low-code/no-code tools to move fast and reinvent their employee and customer experiences while reducing risk.”
Enterprise architects assigned the role of delivery leaders should start by identifying their target end users and the value proposition for the proposed platform investments.
3. Sponsor for operational and risk management solutions
While many business risk areas will find sponsors in operations, finance, and risk management functions, finding sponsors and prioritizing investments to reduce IT risks can be challenging. Enterprise architects can act as program sponsors, especially around infrastructure and risk-mediating investments required by IT operations, information security, and data governance functions. Architects are uniquely positioned to connect problems with solutions and provide objective input on where to prioritize investments.
One area to focus on is defining AI governance, sponsoring tools for data security, and funding data governance initiatives. Unfortunately, many organizations still view data quality and governance functions as a given IT responsibility, leaving these investments without a financial sponsor.
“The use of data, analytics, AI, and machine learning has raised ethical questions regarding privacy and the development of appropriate regulations and governance frameworks to ensure AI is safe, transparent, and accountable,” says Ram Chakravarti, CTO of BMC. “Ultimately, companies will need to address challenges with ethics, bias, data inaccuracy, and more as this technology continues to advance and applications expand.”
A second focus could be investments in site reliability engineering practices such as developing service level objectives (SLOs), improving devops observability practices, and investing in AIops platforms.
“SLOs help architects break down reliability siloes and get visibility into areas of the enterprise stack that are negatively impacting the customer experience,” says Brian Singer, co-founder and chief product officer at Nobl9. “Because SLOs are inherently customer-facing, they empower engineers and executives to anticipate issues and drive business KPIs proactively.”
Enterprise architects assuming a sponsorship role in these initiatives can help steer them toward force-multiplying transformations that reduce risks and provide additional benefits in improved experiences and better decision-making. CIOs who want enterprise architects to act as sponsors should provide them with a budget and oversee the development of a charter for managing investment priorities.
4. Expert advisor in developing standards
Agile teams aim to be self-organizing and focus on solving problems, but that doesn’t mean they live on their own island and can ignore developing and following standards. While agile teams must commit to and complete their user stories, they should rely on outsider experts for guidance and advice.
“Enterprise architects should act as advisors, offering best practices, guidance, and troubleshooting to support self-organizing agile teams, who typically manage their own workflows,” says Simon Margolis, associate CTO of AI/ML at SADA.
Acting as advisors and coaches can improve collaboration with agile teams who can view enterprise architecture, governance, and standards as innovation inhibitors.
“Enterprise architects can empower agile teams by providing architectural guidance rather than imposing rules,” says Paul Boynton, COO and co-founder of CSI. “They should collaborate with teams to build and improve skills, delivering value quickly through team goals that ensure the architecture supports business value with real-time solutions. By acting as agile partners, enterprise architects and agile teams can unlock efficiency, deliver innovation, and create value together.”
Architects should be expert advisors to agile development teams around architecture, security, data, and operational best practices. CIOs and their agile program management office (PMO) should define the expert advisor’s role and responsibilities when working with agile teams. As expert advisors, enterprise architects can suggest and review implementations and collaborate with teams to define self-organizing standards.
5. Change agent in governing citizen development
One way CIOs can help enterprise architects become more attuned to employee experiences and department workflow is by giving them a pivotal role in governing citizen development and data science programs. As more CIOs have become receptive to deploying no-code technologies to business teams, who better to develop governance principles around security, testing, and documenting citizen-developed technologies?
But asking enterprise architects to create a citizen development or data science governance framework is unlikely to gain adoption unless the authors have a strong understanding of departmental objectives. Giving enterprise architects the assignment as a change management exercise means they must promote departmental adoption, listen to employee needs, and institute governance practices as part of the change efforts.
“Having a low/no-code program with clearly defined best practices and permissions empowers employees to be citizen developers while mitigating security risks,” says Vikram Karakoti, VP and global group head of enterprise solutions at TCS. “As automation and artificial intelligence become a ubiquitous part of business life, having strong low/no-coder governance is crucial for companies to balance agility and business resilience.”
Every digital transformation initiative should identify change agents in its charter and assign change management responsibilities across the agile team. By assigning architects the change agent role in citizen programs, architects will better understand end-user needs and define governance that doesn’t undermine productivity or innovation.
Engaged enterprise architects deliver results
The examples I’ve shared focus on program leadership roles, but enterprise architects can also assume responsibility for working on agile teams as teammates. For example, they can partner with product owners and agile business analysts to document non-functional acceptance criteria as they write agile user stories and specify performance, security, and other operational requirements. Architects should also roll up their sleeves and commit to completing user stories on agile development teams when working on new technology proofs of concepts (POCs).
Enterprise architects have been accused of sitting in an ivory tower, dreaming up idealized standards, and drafting elaborate presentations around architectural patterns. CIOs looking to improve the execution around these standards and communicate enterprise architecture’s value should provide architects with agile leadership roles that align them with a delivery model.