| | MAY 20198CIOReviewEA TRANSFORMATION FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONBy Venu Yalavarthi, Head of Enterprise Architecture, Digital Transformation Specialist, Ingredion IncorporatedDigital Transformation is the driving force in the latest wave of enterprise transformations and disruptions. Organizations intend to harness the transformative force of Digital Transformation (DX) to remain competitive in today's digital business arena. Why DX - because its value is compelling, and organizations can only ignore at their own peril. Embracing digital transformation is a key priority for many companies to remain afloat and grow. It is on the agenda of executive leadership and companies are embarking on initiatives for digital. The disruptive technology updates create chao and uncertainty for organization's future viability unless it is well organized and prepared. Hence, your business relies on IT and Enterprise Architecture (EA) to conquer the digital world. Technologies underpinning DX are many, such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud, Customer Excellence, Industry 4.0, Digital Twins, Block Chain, Data Sciences, Predictive Analytics, Virtual Reality, Intelligent everything, etc., and new frontiers keep opening regularly. For IT, these bring substantial changes -Server to Serverless, Data center to Cloud, Core to Edge, Customer Experience to Digital Experience, Business Intelligence (BI) to Artificial Intelligence (AI), System of Record to System of Touch,are examples of changes upending the traditional paradigms.What this all means for EA? The role of EA in Digital Transformation is even more important and relevant. To meet these expectations for EA, we need to remodel EA to be ready for DX, i.e. EA Transformation (EX) for Digital Transformation (DX). Best approach to navigate these uncharted waters is to start with typical roles of EA at your organization and for such each role, make concerted and methodological effort to restructure and repoint EA to enable successful DX.Framework - Anticipate shift from traditional, heavy weight EA frameworks such as artifact or process centric frameworks to frameworks that are nimble, lean and agile such as Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Redefine and revamp EA standards, processes and governance to ensure success for this newly defined framework. Similarly, modernize tenets of Architecture Review Board (ARB) to reflect DX imperatives.Strategies and reference models that foster innovation, design thinking, and customer centricity emerge as focus areas. EA should leap frog innovation, future proof technology landscape and leverage technology to drive digital transformation. EA should become a trusted innovation advisor to CIO, CDO or CMO in technology and investment recommendations, as they are tasked to holistic organizational transformation.Increase business connectedness to align EA strategies with business strategies and be proactive to business demands.A recent survey by McKinsey finds that when companies go all in on digitization, the number of point-to-point connections among systems rises almost 50%, the quality of business-process Venu Yalavarthi IN MYOPINION
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