Managing Ideation and Innovation with Enterprise Architecture
Organizations largely recognize the need for enterprise architecture tools, yet some still struggle to communicate their value and prioritize such initiatives.
As data-driven business thrives, organizations will have to overcome these challenges because managing IT trends and emerging technologies makes enterprise architecture (EA) increasingly relevant.
“By 2021, 40 percent of organizations will use enterprise architects to help ideate new business innovations made possible by emerging technologies,” says Marcus Blosch, Vice President Analyst, Gartner.
With technology now vital to every aspect of the business, enterprise architecture tools and EA as a function help generate and evaluate ideas that move the business forward.
Every business has its own (often ad hoc) way of gathering ideas and evaluating them to see how they can be implemented and what it would take to deploy them.
But organizations can use enterprise architecture tools to bridge the gap between ideation and implementation, making more informed choices in the process.
By combining enterprise architecture tools with the EA team’s knowledge in a process for managing ideas and innovation, organizations can be more strategic in their planning.
Emerging technologies is one of the key areas in which such a process benefits an organization. The timely identification of emerging technologies can make or break a business. The more thought that goes into the planning of when and how to use emerging technologies, the better the implementation, which leads to better outcomes and greater ROI.
Enterprise Architecture Tools: The Fabric of Your Organization
At its 2019 Gartner Enterprise Architecture & Technology Innovation Summit, Gartner identified 10 emerging and strategic technology trends that will shape IT in the coming years.
They included trends that utilize intelligence, such as autonomous things and augmented analytics; digital trends like empowered edge and immersive experiences; mesh trends like Blockchain and smart spaces; as well as broad concepts like digital ethics and privacy and quantum computing.
As these trends develop into applications or become part of your organization’s fabric, you need to think about how they can help grow your business in the near and long term. How will your business investigate their use? How will you identify the people who understand how they can be used to drive your business?
Many organizations lack a structured approach for gathering and investigating employee ideas, especially those around emerging technologies. This creates two issues:
1. When employee ideas fall into a black hole where they don’t get feedback, the employees become less engaged.
2. The emerging technology and its implementation are disconnected, which leads to silos or wasted resources.
How Enterprise Architecture Tools Help Communicate the Value of Emerging Technologies
When your enterprise architecture is aligned with your business outcomes it provides a way to help your business ideate and investigate the viability of ideas on both the technical and business level. When aligned correctly, emerging technologies can be evaluated based on how they meet business needs and what the IT organization must do to support them.
But the only way you can accurately make those determinations is by having visibility into your IT services and the application portfolio. And that’s how enterprise architecture can help communicate the value of emerging technologies in your organization.
erwin EA provides a way to quickly and efficiently understand opportunities offered by new technologies, process improvements and portfolio rationalization and translate them into an actionable strategy for the entire organization.
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