In today’s post-pandemic business world, only one thing is certain: change. 

For companies, this puts a bigger onus than ever before on agility, adaptability, and flexibility. It also means companies need to step out of their comfort zones and try new approaches and methods. Companies will need to implement new methodologies and tools to support and drive organizational growth, giving business leaders the knowledge they need to make decisions.

Everyone from CIOs to enterprise architects (EAs) has a role to play as their companies navigate the constant change around them. Here are five trends they can focus their initiatives on for high-level business transformation that supports strategic plans.

1. Socio-Technical Architecture

Socio-technical architecture amplifies organization design: the social interactions, autonomy, mastery, and purpose of the people doing the work in the organization. Socio-technical architecture is increasingly important as all organizations embrace digitization, as it provides a way of viewing the organization that helps EAs adjust to a more effective way of working. 

Using this methodology means moving away from thinking about enterprise architecture in terms of the enterprise’s applications, processes, and information. It shifts the focus to people, ensuring that they are happier and perform better for the organization when they have a stronger sense of purpose and mastery over the problem to be solved.

2. From Project to Product

Traditionally, organizations have used the plan-build-run model to handle change but, with the complexity of projects today, teams are made to focus more on individual projects. By comparing the project-focused approach with the product-focused approach, you can clearly see the different ways the two approaches manage change handling and fully understand their core principles.

But, like every enterprise design decision, there are tradeoffs. Project to product aims to change the organization model so that units can work on their own, needing less direction and not in competition with one another. In a perfect world, this would work with every value stream. However, projects frequently go across organizational areas, and those must be coordinated and prioritized.

3. The Democratization of Enterprise Architecture

As its name suggests, during democratization of enterprise architecture, large-scale design work becomes more democratic. For example, each team holds responsibility for the design, operation, realization, and future-state direction of their own semi-independent business area. Having teams hold responsibility causes a control power-shift. The older method of having the organization’s technology resources held in centralized architecture governance is becoming increasingly impractical.

Data democratization is significantly impacting the enterprise, changing how it operates and the types of tooling it needs for success. EAs find their job shifting more to facilitator and coordinator roles.

4. Continuous Improvement of the Ways of Working

Enterprise architecture constantly works to build capabilities, especially IT solutions. When EAs adjust the system that builds the system, they design the way of working. Keep in mind, the way of working can be considered a system – its design and architecture provide qualities like traditional architecture design. 

By putting continuous improvement in ways of working into practice, EAs can create teams with more autonomy to make their own decisions. These semi-independent teams function by analyzing, designing, and delivering a change initiative with minimal cross-team coordination.

5. The Enterprise Architecture as a Digital Twin of the Organization

The digital twin of the organization (DTO) combines conventional enterprise architecture models with situational awareness information to support improved decision-making. It creates virtual representations of a physical product or system. The physical product and virtual representation are fully integrated, so that both stay up to date, and any changes in the virtual counterpart are reflected in the physical system. 

With the DTO, EAs can see a continuous feedback loop between structural data they know from traditional EA models and the operational data of the organization, giving information on the trend of lead time for business ideas to benefit realization. 

Progressive companies that apply these new concepts from the EA domain into their digital business execution will be better positioned to plan for future outcomes, deliver more change and innovation faster, and provide greater value to the market.