Some typical stakeholders concerns I have heard over the years:

• Lack of Experienced Architects

• Lack of trust in IT service vendors to provide a neutral view of their current IT systems

• Lack of Architecture documentation

These concerns may have negative impact on:

• Understanding the impact of new technologies in the market

• Get A neutral view of their IT landscape

• Maximise their investments in IT

The best action for them would be to hire an independent EA who can provide the following benefits:

• A trusted partner to bounce ideas off without any pressure of buying any services from them

• An experienced EA who can help them maximise IT investments by leveraging and reusing existing assets wherever feasible

• A realistic view of IT by documenting end-to-end portfolio level analysis

I would suggest that an EA provide following services to the stakeholders:

EA Development Services

• IT Vision Development - Work with CIO and senior management to document the vision and build a target architecture to meet that vision

• IT Portfolio Analysis (Brownfield, Current State) - Collect all the information of the current systems and document using a standard modeling language

• Architecture Repository Design - Design the structure of various views of the architecture

• Gap Analysis And Roadmap - Build a roadmap to move the architecture from current state to the target state. Document the transition states and changes required to reach that state.

Once a target vision is developed an independent EA can help choose the right partners to realise that vision.

EA Management Services

• Migration Planning - Help managers plan the delivery of EA capabilities

• Project Document Review - Monitor the projects and guide the team as required

• Pre-Sales Vendor Selection - Help find the right vendor for each change

• Business Case / Trade-Off Analysis - Help find the right option for each change

• Market Analysis White Paper (Opportunities) - Keep on top of market changes and understand its impact of current systems

• Implementation Governance Support - Guide the teams towards an agreed vision

• Portfolio Optimisation - Identify and eliminate redundancies in the IT landscape

• Communicate your ideas effectively within and outside the organisation

• Document IT systems in a way that can be read by others without ambiguity

• Get knowledge out of people's head

• Remove dependency on a single team or individual who "knows the systems"

• Link Business with IT

• Boxes-And-Arrows are not very helpful

It is difficult to visualise the future as it changes frequently. The best approach I've found to be is to link IT target with the 5-year business strategy and build a conceptual model to realise that strategy.

• Discuss various target scenarios with the stakeholders

• Visualise the target systems to automate business activities required for each scenario

• Agree on a Target(Business+IT) with stakeholders

• Build IT principles, standards, guidelines

• Govern the various change programs and projects using the above

• Update the current and target architecture at the end

I use the PACE layering method to analyse the IT portfolio and find ways to optimise the assets in the landscape.

Categorising systems in this way helps stakeholders to prioritise the systems that are important to them. This then can be used to optimise the number of systems and reduce the overall complexity.

API Layering can help an organisation manage changes to their systems in a more structured manner. Layering helps in decoupling the Systems Of Records and the front-office Systems Of Innovation. This layering is based on Gartner's PACE layering approach.

IT Principles defined based on these could drive individual projects towards the desired target state.

To a layman, an eCommerce system may feel just like a regular website which basically means that the system has done a good job of hiding the complexity.

Few considerations when selecting a good Digital Marketing solution:

• Dynamic Segmentation - Identification of users into various segments while using your website. Profiling users could become a key input to your campaign design.

• Campaign design - Providing self-service capability to the marketeers is critical to avoid IT intervention for every minor change to campaigns.

• Analytics - A good analytics function will enable better segmentation and tuning of the campaigns.

With an increasing focus on cost reduction, Banks are preparing to digitise much of their systems.

Banks needs to consider few things when embarking on this digital journey:

• Physical Branches - Digitisation of the systems can help bring most of the process online, making it easier to transact using the mobile phones. As less people go to the branches, banks can consolidate them based on their usage.

• 3rd Party Branches - Process standardisation can help in leveraging 3rd party branches in locations where it is not feasible to keep a branch open.

• App Developers - Enabling Open Banking will help app developers in bringing innovative apps to the customers.

• Automation - Internal processes could be automated with AI/RPA kind of technology to remove any redundant activity that don't require human intervention.