Part 3: Enterprise Architect Roles in Planning & Executing the Transformation Journey

In Part 2, we looked at how enterprise architects work with business leaders to shape both technical and non-technical aspects of transformation planning and execution. We focused on how to balance the inherent complexities of the journey with creating simplicity and avoiding the obstacles that can impede progress. Join us here in Part 3 as we focus on enterprise architects’ technical expertise.

Create a Pragmatic, Achievable Roadmap  

Digital transformation is a journey that needs a roadmap of prioritized steps and initiatives that will move the organization toward its target state in a logical, pragmatic way. In addition to the complex web of interactions between a business’s many moving parts, the fast pace of digital transformation adds layers of complexity to the journey. As previously mentioned, many businesses and traditional IT departments struggle to manage the complexity, uncertainty, and shifting objectives. As an enterprise architect with strong prediction and estimation skills, you are well-positioned to move programs from ambiguity to certainty and defined plans. With the ability to see and predict several steps ahead and anticipate results, your team can deliver the roadmaps needed to outline where to begin, the critical initiatives to deliver important new functionality, and how complications and obstacles should be addressed to make strategy execution successful.  

As an EA team, your key role is to create not ‘set and forget’ roadmaps but rather live documents subject to a continuous planning and improvement regimen. This makes your team an active, ongoing participant in the implementation journey, overseeing system designs to ensure the right balance of alignment, quality, robustness, and flexibility to meet current needs and future goals. 

Create a Digital Delivery Capability  

An important early step in guiding transformation is to ensure the organization develops or acquires the digital business skills and associated technology development capabilities that are needed to quickly and iteratively build new business models, products, and customer experiences. Some organizations create a digital delivery team as a separate department within the organization, but as digital engagement has evolved, those skills can be highly useful embedded within the operating structure of the organization. However it is structured, these multi-disciplinary team members should work collaboratively with business thought leaders and have a clear line of sight to customers. Speed of delivery, innovative solutions, and fast test-and-learn cycles are key aspects of this model.  In most cases, this type of digital delivery function doesn’t seamlessly align with standard IT operating models currently the norm in many organizations. To accommodate this, a new hybrid model for technology delivery and operations is needed that marries new iterative development of dynamic customer and employee experiences with stable and reliable (and slower to change) back-end transactional system updates when required. The enterprise architecture team is key to identifying the technology infrastructure that can deliver this level of control with a modern cloud-first architecture and powerful industry-standard tooling.  

Monitor Technology Trends and Developments  

The ability to remain informed on industry trends and new technology developments and to be vigilant in determining if/when the organization should adopt these, is another critical skill set led by enterprise architects. Today’s digital technologies continue to evolve far faster, driven by tech giants (Amazon, Google, Atlassian, et al) with their deep R&D pockets, the open-source software movement, cloud computing (AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, and more) and the continuous maturation of AI. Together, these forces produce a rapid succession of new software architectures, engineering approaches, development methods and frameworks, programming languages, tools, reusable code libraries, deployment models, and the like (microservices, APIs, Agile, automated testing & release, DevOps, continuous delivery, etc.).  

While these enable fast, iterative delivery of new digital solutions and empower teams to be more innovative, they can also add to the complexity of IT landscapes. With the ease of availability of many of these tools (often falling outside standard procurement processes), if not managed carefully, they can quickly create new siloed technologies and systems that burden the business, add to costs, and impede agility. As custodians of the strategic technology architecture for a business, your enterprise architecture team must guide and govern the adoption of these new digital technologies and delivery methods. 

Build Development and Delivery Teams with the Right Skills  

In the digital age, the challenge is to build teams with the right mix of new technical skills and business knowledge to implement real transformational change — and do it quickly and flexibly. Skills such as design thinking, UX design, software engineering, agile development, automation and cloud deployment are the new currency for successful digital transformation.  

Tech giants like Amazon, Google, Uber, and Netflix have shown that software development is no longer a linear or finite project. Instead, it is a customer-driven iterative process focusing on continuous innovation and improvement. These leaders pioneered new software architectures that offer greater modularity, granularity, security and re-use, creating an API- and microservices-driven culture. This has led to mainstream access to powerful automation tools that enable the rapid development/test/release cycles that deliver validated features into production much faster with significantly less risk than traditional “waterfall” projects. Agile methodologies and frameworks and modern continuous delivery software engineering approaches are critical instruments in the toolbox, but they are not the whole solution. Vision, leadership, plans, people, and organizational commitment to execute are critical to building and delivering new solutions.  

Few retailers have the right skills already at hand to implement an immediate shift to continuous delivery. The available talent is in high demand across many industry sectors, making for high competition when recruiting new skills. Retailers embarking on a digital technology journey need to think carefully about how they will acquire or develop these skills and, just as importantly, how they will retain and continue to further develop this expertise. Another important part of the enterprise architect role is identifying skillset gaps outside the core retailer teams to include any new partners (software, implementation, etc.) that will be needed to ensure they have proven resources to deliver what is required for success. 

Build Technology Knowledge Among Senior Executives 

In the digital commerce world, where customer-centricity has had time to mature into an adopted strategy, technology is central to the business proposition. This is somewhat different from the past, where IT was viewed as a support function. Success is now much more about the experiences and services provided to customers, such as rich information, seamless omnichannel shopping journeys, fulfillment options, social media interactions, simple returns, etc. It is no longer solely about the range and availability of products.  

With the need to make technology a core competency for retail operators managing complex store networks, senior executives will benefit by having a much deeper understanding of new technology and an appreciation for how it powers their business and creates new possibilities across their physical store estate. Armed with this knowledge, they will be better positioned to optimize their business and lead transformation initiatives.  

Enterprise architects are in a great position to guide senior executives to become familiar with modern technologies, concepts, terminology constructs, components, and vendors. The opportunity to build knowledge and understanding comes in the many conversations that take place as your team and senior executives jointly formulate strategy, develop technology execution plans, and decide on change initiatives.  

Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that functional, feature-rich deliveries can be released at any time. It aims to build, test, and release software with greater speed and frequency. For optimal value, this should be a two-way educational activity. Your team must also learn from business leaders and be tuned in to key drivers and opportunities for value creation and profit generation. Learning takes many forms. Beyond conversations, senior executives should participate in technology demonstrations and agile solution showcases run by internal development teams. They should expand their knowledge at relevant conferences and technology expos. Your team can advise on suitable events and arrange briefings from selected technology vendors.  

Ideally, enterprise architects and senior leaders will spend as much time discussing their existing business processes and systems as they do exploring new technologies. As mentioned previously, leveraging and adapting existing systems will be a vital part of most transformation journeys. Some of the early steps may well be quick wins generated from clever use of existing capabilities. In any event, effective interworking between new digital channels and existing legacy retail systems will be a key ingredient in transforming the business.  

As digital technology becomes a critical part of how businesses operate in this new world, it will be difficult for senior executives without firsthand knowledge to be strong advocates and transformation leaders. While CIOs and enterprise architects play vital roles, becoming a digitally adept business is far too important to be left only to the technologists in the organization.

Justify Investment in Technology Assets 

Enterprise architecture is pivotal in helping the organization build a case for investing in new and existing technology assets. Digital transformation is a significant investment and must, therefore, be justified by the benefits and value it brings and how quickly those benefits can be realized. Your team is central to imagining and designing new digital channels and experiences. They also define and explain the less visible but equally important changes required for existing core retail systems. Physical store retailers have built up significant assets on which they run their operations – point of sale, self-service kiosks, inventory management, promotions, merchandising, supply chain, payments, etc. Typically, these systems have been in place for many years, having been designed around less digitally engaged physical stores and relatively long technology refresh cycles. These systems are slow and cumbersome to change, having been built in a past era based on monolithic architectures that require long development, testing, and release regimens.  

Customers now expect modern, digitally driven shopping to provide (1) accurate real-time information about products and availability and (2) seamless omnichannel shopping journeys, e.g., BOPIS, ROPIS, Omni-returns and more. Legacy retail systems are not equipped to meet these needs due to their proprietary and monolithic infrastructure and limited access points to connect different channels, often in a siloed manner. Your EA team can help the business justify the changes needed in these systems and the adoption of modern technologies, like a composable unified commerce platform, that will most effectively support the new digital channels that align customer engagement to and from physical stores. They also can provide guidance about how IT can accelerate the change process for legacy systems to better align with the pace of the digital world.  

Enterprise architects must navigate these deep-seated technical challenges and analyze the options for modifying or adapting legacy systems. At a minimum, new interfaces will inevitably have to be designed on legacy systems to enable the connection of new digital front-ends. For those looking to maximize the return from digitizing their stores, the best course of action will be to completely replace a legacy system — no doubt a complex decision process for many senior executives and the CFO, as well as potentially disruptive, if not well planned and executed, for all levels of the retail operation. Creating the pathway for these decisions by outlining options, costs, and investment justification to sponsors is critical for enterprise architects since the journey cannot proceed without executive buy-in. 

CONTINUE HERE: PART 4 - MAKING TRANSFORMATION REAL