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End2End Innovation | Frameworks & Methods

The Role Of Enterprise Architects In Innovation Management

According to a recent a study by McKinsey and Henley Business School, nowadays innovation management and digital transformation go hand in hand. Enterprise Architects can play an integral role in this. The study emphasizes the need for enterprise architects to facilitate digitization by managing technological complexity and setting the course for the evolution of the IT landscape around their companies. While 100% of organisations officially claim to be digital leaders given their investments in new technologies and improvement of existing ones, only one in two organisations (58%) agrees with this statement. According to the study, companies do not invest enough time in combining innovation and enterprise architecture.

At the same time, more and more ongoing projects are being added, complicating the existing systems and creating a cumbersome structure. Often it is no longer clear what impact additional extensions to the system will have. The challenges listed above illustrate how relevant a solid enterprise architecture is to make your company fit for the future and secure a competitive advantage through innovation.

Innovation Management and Enterprise Architecture

Innovation management should effectively pursue the company's goals through innovative ideas, products, processes and business models. This promotes the growth of the company and increases its competitive advantage.

The entire innovation process must be actively managed and controlled. Business and IT leaders must work together to implement the continuous changes. Enterprise Architects support everyone involved in change, from management to production, in dealing with the complex interrelationships and dependencies. If the enterprise architecture in your business is future-oriented, it can help you understand the opportunities and implications of innovative technologies such as AI, new business models, new products or services, improvements in the customer experience, or changes in the environment.

Your enterprise architecture must be able to implement the promising innovation projects and recognize business strategies that can change the architecture. Although innovation and enterprise architecture can be managed successfully separately, the company will only reap benefits and generate synergies when both areas are linked.

New Ways to Innovate

There are plenty of teams having lost their agility in micro services and API spaghetti structures. The more complex their network dependencies become, the faster such innovative teams lose their agility. Instead of delivering optimal results, they find it increasingly difficult to implement major changes. Too many components have to be elaborated simultaneously.

When enterprise architecture is seen as key, it is possible to keep complexity in your organization at bay. To do this, you need to see enterprise architecture as a linchpin connecting various changes. Enterprise Architects help you plan for future change by creating autonomous business and IT capabilities with minimal dependencies.

However, the role of Enterprise Architects is going to change significantly in the future. Instead of pursuing a top-down methodology, they will increasingly become pioneers of change. They support the company in renewing and improving itself. Their task is to optimize innovations today and make them fit for the future. Occasionally, Enterprise Architects can act as innovators. More often, however, they become pioneers of innovation by creating an environment in which change is feasible.

To do this, everyone must be involved while Enterprise Architects provide the entire organization with the knowledge and tools needed to implement local or global change. 

3 Key Roles of Enterprise Architects

There are three key roles Enterprise Architects play in driving innovation:

Inside-out perspective: the role of architects is to create space for innovation, reduce complexity and facilitate change. To enable innovation, all the complex systems must be tamed and kept in check. Otherwise, when all components are interconnected and there are numerous dependencies, change is literally impossible.

Outside-in perspective: the role of architects is to coordinate investments and prioritize in case of numerous innovative projects and initiatives. Ask yourself in which direction your company wants to develop and to what extent initiatives are focused on the desired business results.

Outside-out perspective: the role of architects is to connect business and technology trends from the environment with the internal structures of the company. This helps the business identify, assess and respond to opportunities and risks in its broader ecosystem.

10 Strategies to Bring Together EAs and Innovation Drivers

The strategies that used to work in the past no longer yield far-reaching successes. It is therefore a role of Enterprise Architects to make "just-enough" and "just-in-time" decisions that help businesses remain flexible and innovative. The following 10 strategies can help you to implement them.

Run an innovation health check: Evaluate your Innovation Readiness Level to have a clear understanding where your company is standing today and where it should go tomorrow. The level of readiness is assessed with the Control Objectives for Innovation Management (COFIM) framework used to set the focus, develop new organizational competencies and track progress in the key areas of expertise. By using this metric, you will be able to identify business areas that lack innovation.

Remain adaptable. Enterprise Architects must look to the future and be open to new solutions. Instead of developing a supposedly future-proof strategy that can meet all potential requirements, adaptable solutions must be designed to be able to adapt on the go. 

Experiment and take risks. Innovation requires exploration and a willingness to take risks - a terrain that is unfamiliar to architects and often involves uncertainty. Instead of controlling all processes, one should seek new ways to give the company a continuous competitive advantage. The speed of change can collide with a culture of control.

Make compromises. Adapt your strategy to your needs. For example, if you want to maximize cost efficiency, you could share resources within your organization. But if each of your business units uses the same IT infrastructure with different requirements, this complexity can hinder rather than encourage innovation.

Take outside-in and outside-out perspectives. Architects should be involved in strategic discussions about the direction of the company. In this way, they learn more about the company's environment and its role in it. They can also respond adequately to the various needs of customers, partners and other stakeholders. Adapting exclusively to your environment is not enough. As an innovative company you should influence your environment in your own interest. In this way, disruptive changes are created leading to the development of new markets and ecosystems.

Contribute to shaping the ecosystem. The tools and techniques you use can also be applied to your ecosystem. In this way, Enterprise Architects can test whether new business ideas are feasible. In addition, they can help polish business for agility, so that you can respond immediately to changes and opportunities. This applies to all business capabilities and processes as well as IT and other technologies.

Monitor trends and technologies: Use tools to monitor technology trends and signals in the marketplace and put them into business context. Use curated trend and technology content to gain actionable insight and additional inspiration via the cloud-based ITONICS Radar software platform. Visualize the relevance and timing of selected technology trends and how they relate to others.

Develop future-proof scenarios: Conduct scenario planning to show cost-benefit trade-offs that need to be made for a selection of innovation initiatives. With a variety of scenarios in place, you will have an overview of all factors potentially affecting business activities as well as their estimated impact and likelihood of occurrence. This will allow you to make better decisions and develop robust strategies for different scenarios.

Create portfolios: Collaborate to create technology plans that optimize capabilities and implement digital strategies. Analyze and monitor your technology portfolio against your strategic goals and identify innovation gaps. This allows you to effectively invest in new technologies that have great potential both as products and new markets in the future.

Communicate via digital roadmaps: Enable stakeholders to visualize the common path to the future by using roadmaps to highlight cross-functional relationships. Create an environment with company-wide alignment on collaboration activities allowing for efficient day-to-day planning as well as a long-term strategic planning. Thus, you will be able to leverage digital roadmaps to build that transparent innovative and collaborative ecosystem.

The Future Role of Enterprise Architects

Today's business models are changing rapidly. This means a major shift for business architects and technology innovation leaders from technology to strategy development. Today, too many EAs still play a supporting and advisory role instead of driving the digital business and being actively involved in management decisions. The continuous innovation and monitoring of digital trends and new technologies as a key element for digital business success.

The enterprise architect role is changing at the speed of digital transformation. In the past, enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders offered guidance on in-flight projects, fiscal-cycle planning, and assessing the fitness and value of existing IT assets.

Today and especially in the future, successful enterprise architects will shift their focus toward continuous innovation and planning — promising the convergence of innovation and operations in near real-time.

Digital innovation management tools, such as ITONICS Platform, enable teams to get the most out of the synergy between enterprise architecture and innovation management. Drive digital business with the help of strategic technology portfolios and combine strategy and innovation centrally and create groundbreaking digital growth opportunities. 


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