COVID future of Enterprise Architecture

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a huge disruption. Many businesses have closed, and the workforce has started working remotely. The change has been so great that organisations can no longer simply return to pre-crisis operations. As they look towards the end of the crisis, they must reinvent themselves for a 'new normal'.

Here are five predictions of the post-COVID world and their impact on enterprise architecture.

1.) Online transactions and remote working will be the new norm

With the COVID-19 crisis, most business transactions are now done online, and employees work remotely most of the time. Migrations of applications to the cloud will continue at an even faster pace than before the crisis. As an EA, you need to understand the migration strategy to apply to each application. The strategy can be categorised into various types, such as “Rehost” – or “lift-and-shift” - which consists of moving an application to the cloud without re-architecting it, or “Refactor” that consists of re-architecting the application by leveraging cloud-native features.

2.) Business digitization will accelerate

Now that more and more transactions are performed online, organizations must accelerate their digitization efforts. This translates into rethinking the customer experience and more specifically the customer journey.

As an enterprise architect, you need to connect with business leaders and understand the new customer journeys they want to implement. By mapping customer touchpoints to business capabilities in a customer journey map, you get a better view of the impacted business capabilities and even identify emerging capabilities. By evaluating these capabilities against parameters such as complexity, performance, and criticality, you can build strategic initiatives that focus on the capabilities that provide the most value to both the customer and the organization.

Value Streams is another tool that helps you understand the value delivered to your customers. It represents the series of steps that an organization uses to implement solutions, as described in the SAFe framework while customer journey maps seek to describe the emotions, intent, and individual interactions with a customer.

Like in customer journey maps, connecting business capabilities to value streams will help you plan business capabilities, and hence initiatives.

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