This question has been prompted in my mind by the author of the book The Art of Business Value, Mark Schwartz. He has been performing as CIO in several private and public enterprises, often at crossroads in his search for Business Value and to earn a seat at the CXO Table.

His quest was often full of challenges as the meaning of business value varied depending on the culture and the context of an enterprise. It is stated as a key factor and one of the principles in agile methods, but these methods do not even mention CIO’s job position and see the position of Enterprise Architect as a mere supplier of technology architecture.

The most recent version of Scaled Agile Framework SAFe 6.0 defines Enterprise Architect as responsible for establishing the portfolio’s technology vision, strategy, and roadmap. He is supposed to provide the vision, evolution, and communication of an enterprise’s technical architecture, creating the strategy and portfolio-level technical roadmaps for new and innovative technologies. Here, we can conclude that he needs to focus on Application and Technology Portfolios.

This seems to be far from the skillset defined by SFIA 8.0 and the European e-Competence Framework, which implies large consultations of many different types of stakeholders. SFIA 8.0 connects enterprise and business architecture skills to other “a la carte” skills like strategic planning, solution architecture, business analysis and requirements elicitation, and management. In its current design approach, SAFe 6.0 is connecting activities performed in portfolio flow and solution train flow to enterprise strategy through strategic themes and portfolio vision mechanisms and does not consider enterprise architect or a CIO as key stakeholders in achieving business agility.

While the vision of having an enterprise where business and IT elements are interwoven is nice, we know from realities around us that it is not happening everywhere, that digital native enterprises are the minority, and that we have lots of legacy organizations and systems that are very challenging for digital transformation. From our assessments and other organizations’ assessments, we can see that achieving agility@scale is the most challenging factor in digital transformations, and driving these transformations based on business value and risk assessment is the best approach.

Here comes the question: Who’s got the skills to do that?

Is Business Value the same as Customer Value or User Value?

Is a Product Manager that is supposed to have some skills of a weathered Enterprise and Business Architect the best replacement for EA in a number of processes where we need to combine business and technology skills?

Are strategic themes and portfolio kanban the best type of artifact to replace architectural practice that uses architectural models representing abstractions from realities and dealing with the complexity and dependencies of a large architectural landscape?

To be able to develop good models we need to understand the context and real enterprise. We are uniquely qualified to be a vital link between Business Strategy and IT, enabling organizations to transform digitally. We should establish an enterprise architecture management that is participatory and collaborative to enable effective change management. By connecting with different stakeholders and their views on the business value, we can build consensus on what is Business Value in each context and when to apply outside-in or inside-out perspectives. This should facilitate the evaluation of business cases, driven by value and risk assessment as demand is always unlimited while the capacity to perform new initiatives of an enterprise is limited.

I am not discounting here the role of Product Management but in the decision-making, evaluation of value cannot be done only from Customer Perspective if an organization wants to establish a coherent and successful transformation program where Enterprise Architecture helps in dealing with challenges like a reconfiguration of the Operating Model or Technical Debt and Complexity of a large ecosystem.

A recent study performed by Architecture & Governance Magazine, confirms the strategic role of the enterprise architect but at the same time, we can see that 44% of companies still have a vision of enterprise architecture centered on IT compared to 26% centered on business. Only 18% of architects surveyed say they are systematically consulted on company development projects. However, it is emphasized that internal collaborations with enterprise architects mainly concern the security, R&D, and application development departments, areas in which the added value of enterprise architecture no longer needs to be proven. In summary, 80% of architects are saying that their company still suffers from too many manual processes, and 79% of them believe that they have a lot of difficulties collaborating with their entire organization. When the main purpose of enterprise architecture is to support the company’s businesses and their transformation, it comes up against difficulties related to collaboration with the businesses and objectives that conflict with IT priorities.

So, it all comes down to this quest for business value. If enterprise architects will continue to report to IT management and execute their agenda or their main focus will be still technology architecture instead of business architecture, their skillset mostly technical instead of strategic and soft skills set enabling them to communicate with various stakeholder groups that have no systems thinking skills and do not understand architecture models, they will not score high on the perception of business value they deliver to the enterprise.

If you want to cross the systems skill divide and improve your storytelling, and your ability to improve your business case and architecture review process, we can design for you a comprehensive coaching program that can assist you in becoming a better and valued enterprise architect. You can get in touch with me at [email protected].

By Alex Wyka, EA Principals Senior Consultant and Principal