When planning for future upgrades, traditional enterprise architecture approaches assume a relatively stable external context. Certainly there will be trends–the ever increasing memory capacity and corresponding processor power have followed Moore’s law for several decades. Planning based on such trends tends to focus on the gap between the As-Is and the To-Be states. Enterprises focus on milestones that provide business value along the path to the eventual To-Be state. Each milestone also presents an opportunity for evaluation and course correction if, for example, the original requirements were not interpreted correctly.
However, today’s enterprises are experiencing many kinds of disruptions, from pandemics, supply chain issues, generative AI, inflation, unavailability of workers, etc. How can an enterprise work toward a single To-Be vision when the impact of these disruptions is unknown? Many of the assumptions made when the strategy was formulated may no longer be valid. That is, the with the proposed updates, the enterprise capabilities may no longer fit the emerging context. How should strategists and enterprise architects respond?
Our approach is to assume that there are several plausible futures each differentiated by one of more key uncertain factors. Rather than planning and architecting for a single future, enterprises can start with the assumption that they must be able to adapt capabilities to fit each of the identified plausible futures. To make uncertain futures more concrete, strategists can create scenarios that incorporate key aspects of the expected context. Focusing on these scenarios, and the paths needed to get there, strategists and strategic enterprise architects can define the flexibility required to adapt capabilities to fit any of these identified future contexts.
Of course, disruptions can be frequent, so a continuous and iterative approach to the architecture will cause adaptations as formerly plausible futures become unlikely and new possibilities emerge. How does the strategic enterprise know when to adapt the architecture to newly emerging contexts? Strategic signals can play an important role. By defining specific future events necessary for a given future scenario to occur, strategists can watch to see if these events in fact happen and update both the scenarios and paths to reflect the contextual changes caused by disruptions. Similarly, strategists can also watch for unanticipated contextual changes and determine whether they should be considered strategic signals for their enterprise, that is, should they cause a re-evaluation of the plausible scenarios, so that architectural flexibility can be adapted as needed.
Developing multiple scenarios and building such flexibility into enterprise architectures is clearly much more difficult than planning for a single To-Be state. And no enterprise is likely to understand plausible futures accurately. However, just the discipline needed to consider major disruptive uncertainties can result in more robust capabilities. An ongoing protocol that looks for events that are early warning signs of significant contextual shifts can provide enterprises with critical lead time to adapt to change.