Break Boundaries for Survival

    In today's era of AI, ML, digital transformations and disruptive innovations, it is important for business leaders and technology leaders to break silos and work together to form a business co-strategy.

Image Credit: The Open Group

    Digital Business Models demand boundary-less information flow within and challenge businesses to form competitive strategies. Businesses and Enterprises who would fail to do so, may struggle to survive. A lot of businesses have adapted Enterprise Architecture Framework and Practice to help digitization, transformation, process automation, develop capabilities to shift horizons and be agile. Customer-centric businesses need to be very dynamic and prepare for next generation demand fulfillment. We are yet to see industry and markets where customer experience is purely based on virtual reality. With introduction of 5G technologies, Cognitive Behavior Modeling, AI, IoT, Blockchain, Augmented Reality, Automation and what not, businesses should prepare themselves to devise value creation strategy by breaking the legacy boundaries between various functions, practices, departments & IT and strengthen internal collaboration. "Survival of the fittest" phrase was coined during 1860s but still applies to livings and businesses, who evolves and adapt changes faster, survives.

    Business should invest more into emerging technologies, research and development and not just digitization or digital transformation. Challenge own business capabilities to architect for future and strive for innovation.

    Most of businesses follow top-to-bottom approach for information flow and decisions are implemented in same path. There are very rare decisions which are being influenced due to information flowing from bottom-to-top and it is mostly feedback or evaluation that follows this path. The top leaders, board & CxOs defines vision for a business and are always steering business towards that vision. They are the role models for all people managers working for them. The culture at work-place in business plays very crucial role in making any decision successful. I have seen situations in large enterprise organization where critical decisions are made but failed to achieve as the culture within organization did not cultivate value of change.

    We see a trend in enterprises where CTO still reports to CFO or COO, this is mainly because such businesses do not consider IT as value creator and may be still categorize IT as Cost Center. Rather, it is IT which contributes along with core business and it's people to keep enterprises alive and in current industry, businesses who knows value of IT and leverage it's full potential to transform their business are leading.

    More than 35% of leading start-ups across world are Technology based. This shows how next generation enterprises are focusing on their strong foundation. It is very important for businesses and enterprises to transform their infrastructure and align themselves to industry evolution. There are businesses who were behind in race but now are leading just because they were able to hit the nail, identify pain area and management supported everything required for their turn around. In fact, such business were able to change their image from being conservative to an early birds using technology.

    Being Technology Consultant & an Enterprise Architect, I am engaged in multiple conversations with stakeholders at customer business and I still have to go multiple rounds with various departments which are still working in silos. Though any two or more departments are inter-dependent or inter-linked, they are not eager to understand each other's problems and share information or support the digital journey. This makes difficult to meet the goals for businesses and delay milestones in their journey to achieve the target vision. Hence, all businesses and enterprises must work to implement collab-culture, this will certainly help to reduce silos, not completely but it would initiate a chain reaction to reduce the gaps between two or more departments. Hence, the stepping stone is for Business Leaders and Technology Leaders in an organization to jointly create co-strategy and work on it's implementation together. They should work on bringing IT close to Business.

    Technology keeps changing every five years or less, look at the evolution from Mainframes to Containers, Monolithic Applications to Micro-services and you will understand this clearly. Hence it is necessary for business leadership to build a strong governance which values Technology and empowers CTO function and his/her Architect & Technology Teams to provide suitable solutions in time and implement them to enable right path and pace for the business. If there are no silos, business process people would understand importance of such transformation projects and would support as they can for quicker and smoother implementation. Sometimes, organization's inertia also impacts pace of decision making, sponsorship, etc and slows down project implementation. Which indirectly hurts business as their peers in competition surpasses them. This example can be seen in any industry domain and not specific to only one or two industry domain.

Types of boundaries....

There are mainly four types of boundaries, following are definition as per The Open Group:

1. Infrastructural: Organization of the interconnecting and underlying facilities
2. Structural: System growth is limited  by the "strength" or scalability of its structure
3. Architectural: Differently architected technologies often don't "fit" with each other
4. Semantic: Different ways of representing same thing

    Be it any business, enterprise or organization, boundary-less information flow is very crucial for being successful. Cultivating culture of collaboration within an organization helps to break the silos and allows required information to flow boundary-less helping it's people and business to achieve what business wants. Certainly Enterprise Architecture can guide and help preparing required plan and approach to design an organization or a system that allows boundary-less information flow at its root. There are many frameworks available, being referred by Enterprise Architectures to help breaking listed boundaries within an organization. Most of organizations are realizing importance of boundary-less information flow and Enterprise Architecture Practice, and are implementing them. A cultural change is most difficult change and adopting agile models, wont be able to achieve business vision single handed. If businesses want to survive, they must include such cultural change and enterprise architecture practices into their roadmap towards transformation.

I will be publishing series of blogs on this & other related topics. Please also visit my other blogs here.