Mitigating Disruptive Innovation with Enterprise Architecture in the Digital Age

Moving through 2022 and beyond, Enterprise Architecture (EA) offers values in addressing digital transformation and it has grown from a support function into a very strategic function, that is in charge for designing an intelligent architecture to create new capabilities that supports digitalisation and innovation. The rapid changes of emerging technologies have forced EA to evolve. A well devised EA can be a means to mitigate disruptive innovation while also enabling opportunities for future revenue streams.

Enterprise Architecture as an Innovative Strategy

Today, organisations see market leaders and stagnant industries disrupted by innovative challengers. They no longer only in the business of selling or creating. It’s a moving business and they are a part of something bigger.  Organisations can use EA to devise a balanced strategy as an innovative strategy that can help to give a competitive advantage.

There is an aspect of EA that keep on progressing. It ensures how business units are inter connected and inter-dependent and most importantly, how today’s technology supporting them. Even though it is deemed as inevitable, many organisations are not where EA is today.

EA practices have always been about technology and will continue to be about technology but nonetheless EA still incorporate business architecture to focus on developing new capabilities and map them into whole landscape of the enterprise. Business architecture that provides a mutual understanding of the organisation and deals with the structure of the enterprise regarding its governance structure, business processes, and business information.

Providing value to customers is paramount to organisations in every industry, ensuring that the product or service is not constrained in delivering its value is essential, and an organisation should ensure consistency between its capabilities, its strategy, and its business model in order to best deliver this value.

By taking time to consider disruptive innovation whilst undertaking EA practices, organisations can adapt from focusing solely on their core products to being better able to counter potential disruption while also creating opportunities for resilient new revenue streams

Businesses are moving into a perpetual Enterprise Architecture where they have to be able to change course rapidly, be aware for the disruption and continuously creating new capabilities. Looking ahead, Enterprise Architecture will depend heavily on the architects and their engagement because they are permeating the business. Enterprise architects need to have deep knowledge of technologies, know how these technologies are applied to drive business capabilities and innovations.