| | DECEMBER 20209CIOReviewefficiency strategy from before ­ more technologies are bad and fewer are better. This is true. It also misses the point. Bad design is expensive. Complex processes to govern the what and not the how is expensive. It can work though. Put a group of architects from across your business in a room and ask them, "How would you build this business FROM NOW ON?" They will produce some principles (how) and standards (what) that reflect what they think. Don't worry, the odd one or two who think mainframes are making a comeback or that automated testing is just witchcraft will be sidelined. Govern that. And encourage the outliers to re-skill. You will find that the architects keep each other honest. Although a Chief Architect trusted across the businesses who can play tie-breaker is helpful. I have seen it done across 30+ businesses. TRANSFORMATIONAL ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE All is not lost. Talk to any EA and they will tell you they are looking for a deep understanding of what technology investments will best serve the business. Believe me, they're not intentionally wasting their time. The quality of conversation an organization has about its strategy and what it means for all functions (not just technology) is really what is at issue. That's what makes the self-governance work. Many organisations have embarked on technology transformations. Exactly what these entail often may only be communicated using great quantities of PowerPoint. So we will have to "pass over it in silence" (as Wittgenstein, another expert in semantics said). The implications for organisations changing structure & process to exploit new technologies are profound though, resulting in renewed focus on customer experience, changing how teams work and adopting the technologies and practices that the perceived leaders use... like cloud, devops etc.An organisation dealing with something it sees as a new existential threat which galvanizes action and transformation is a great opportunity for pragmatic EA:"What does improved customer experience mean for how we develop and deploy code?""What are the INTERNAL technology barriers to driving digital adoption?"Those would be useful conversations to have and your EA function can help you get to an answer. In situations such as this, EA functions should focus on the new and how to build the future. The alternative is EA seen as applying arbitrary governance from a (mistrusted) legacy source and opposed at every turn. Given the likely importance of the strategic initiative they are unlikely to win. PLATFORM ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE At Scotiabank, we decided to design a platform that implements all of the standards that matter. It is called PLATO. We took into account our digital transformation objectives, the fact that we operate in more than 50 markets and have heavy retail presence in South America. We realized that security was our number one priority. We also realized that any set of technologies that would be relevant would not only enable the future but also the transformation of the past. We built a platform based on continuous delivery, policy-as-code and cloud native development, backed by a world class secure data and analytics platform on the cloud. Today, we have over 450 applications running on PLATO and the conversation isn't about standards but about how to move faster to get the benefits of the platform. Good EA is about knowing what matters to those who build your solutions and how to help them all do it the same way. That isn't semantics, it's creating a common grammar for how everybody talks about technology. At some point they make a leap into technology choice where, usually, the business stakeholders look away in confusion, Enterprise Architects rub their hands in glee and the engineers who will be left implementing the decisions run for the hills
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