Experts predict hot enterprise architecture trends for 2021

Luca de Risi, COO, Mega International: 2020 was the year of COVID, and of course, some budgets have been cut. One trend I see continuing in the next six months is enterprise architecture to manage resiliency. It’s going back to the basics really, gaining control of your IT Outcome-driven EA will increase. We see people asking to do less description and more action. They don’t want to spend time drawing a ton of models. They want more automation, and they want to focus on designing their future states. People are asking for automatic discovery. That can be process mining, task mining or data discovery.

I see a shift from pure IT-based enterprise architecture to business-oriented enterprise architecture, with architects not focusing just on EA frameworks but on how they can provide real value to the business in terms of data governance, IT compliance and customer journey. We’re receiving more requests from existing customers who want to go further with enterprise architecture to support business transformation. They say, ‘We’ve done the application inventory. We mastered portfolio management. What do we do next?’ Data is being seen as a strategic asset, so they want to govern the data. Data governance is a domain that has existed for a while, but the connection with EA is a growing trend. Enterprise architects can also provide full visibility on the IT landscape to help the CISO demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements. We are also starting to see customer journey as a mandatory item in many RFPs [requests for proposals]. That involves key performance indicators and the balanced scorecard.

Erik Bakstad

Erik Bakstad, co-founder and interim CEO, Ardoq: There is increasing competition in enterprise architecture tools, with a lot of new players. There’s going to be more investing in RD. Hopefully, that means customers will get better tools for their EA initiatives. We’ll see tools going in different directions and having different focuses. The newer generation of tools is typically data-driven. You don’t draw your architecture. It is basically derived from the data you put into the tools. That opens up different uses for data analytics to create future-state scenarios, quantify the benefits to the business and use that to make strategic decisions. You can do organizational modeling. It’s difficult to do that unless you have a data-driven approach, because you would have to create every single future-state scenario. The entire delivery vehicle for the newer tools is cloud only, so you can deploy more rapidly. Companies that have moved to the cloud over the last couple of years realize that you can’t be in one cloud anymore. You have to be in multiple clouds in order to ensure redundancy. That’s another area where EA tools are focusing, creating native integration with these modern-day cloud environments and using enterprise architecture practices to manage and model them.

Bernd Gross

Bernd Gross, CTO, Software AG: Multi-cloud has become a new strategic importance for many software architects because of business requests to serve the global market and the political uncertainty between China and the United States. Architectural demand in the past used to be that I, as an enterprise, could move my data from Cloud A to Cloud B, be independent and retain ownership of the data. Multi-cloud today means that you can sit, for example, on Azure in the United States, on AWS in Europe and on Alibaba in China. These kinds of multi-cloud capabilities are becoming extremely important for many companies going forward because you are not allowed to run applications or services from Europe or from the U.S. if you serve the Chinese market. Chinese customers require you to deploy in Chinese clouds. So, if you, as an enterprise, want to serve your products globally with digital services — which is happening almost as a standard nowadays — you have to be able to support your customers regardless of the cloud platform.

André Christ

André Christ, CEO, LeanIX: Continuous transformation is going to become much more important for companies and for enterprise architects, who can play a big role in it. Instead of a one-time, big digital transformation, you’ll have a number of transformation programs going on in parallel. One reason is mergers and acquisitions. Looking at the economy now, with COVID, we see companies at a stage where they will acquire other businesses to create a bigger footprint and accelerate their own innovation. We’ve seen that in the pharma industry in the past, and we’re going to see it accelerating this year, especially in tech, travel and retail. So, the ability of an organization to do multiple transformations will become an ongoing theme.