Digital Transformation Needs Digital Architecture

by David Knott
Head of Architecture, Wipro Digital
@DrDavidKnott

Digital transformation changes everything, including Enterprise Architecture

Forrester Research’s recent report on Enterprise Architecture services, The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Architecture Service Providers, Q1 2015, observed that, “Digital business is driving demand that EA teams struggle to meet.” Forrester also distinguished between traditional EA services, such as staff augmentation and architecture deliverables, and advanced EA services, such as business process design and digital strategy.

We believe this analysis represents a fundamental shift in the value and role of architects. Architects are more in demand than ever before, but must also adapt their methods to deal with an era of continuous disruption, increasing customer expectations, and accelerated delivery.

At Wipro Digital, we combine the power of strategy, design and technology to deliver complete customer journeys, new insights and digitized operations. We deliver through Digital Cells: multi-disciplinary teams, capable of taking customer journeys from concept to code. Architects are integral parts of the Digital Cell, and we have developed our own way of working, geared towards the velocity and volatility of the digital age: we call this Adaptive Architecture.

Adaptive Architecture is a style, a method, an ecosystem and a role for architects. It enables organizations to move fast, to make fundamental decisions with confidence and speed, to derive value from new technology, and to continuously learn from experience and experimentation.

For example, following traditional methods, an architecture team might take many months to select foundational technology components through paper based evaluation, before development can even start. Under the Adaptive Architecture approach, build starts as soon as possible, using the candidate technology components: the practical experience of this build is used to select strategic components.

We believe that this recognition of the changing world, combined with our strong established architecture capability and talent, contributed to Forrester citing Wipro as a leader for EA service providers.

The Forrester report noted above also observed that, “Wipro’s advanced EA services are less sophisticated than those of other providers, but their simplicity can be an advantage if you are trying to get other stakeholders in your company to understand and agree to EA projects.”

We wear that simplicity with pride: we believe that the new role of the architect is to take the increasing complexity of new technology and put it to work delivering simple outcomes and experiences for our clients and their customers.

To succeed in this new role, architects must have the technical and professional skills to grasp complexity, and the communication and leadership skills to make it simple. We have built the Wipro Digital architecture team on this basis. Many traditional architecture teams focus on technology compliance metrics: standards adherence, technical currency, and numbers of applications.

We measure ourselves by the success of our clients and the satisfaction of their customers.

Originally posted via Wipro Digital