Aligning Innovation with Enterprise Architecture

This IDC Perspective emphasizes the advantages of both tactical and strategic opportunities arising from the alignment of business innovation programs and enterprise architecture (EA). Business innovation programs are positioned to explore emerging opportunities. EA establishes the guardrails for data, system, process, cybersecurity, and system delivery. Aligning the two programs creates strong synergy to interrogate opportunities for breadth and depth of capabilities. EA gains deeper insight into key business drivers and constraints through collaboration on innovation scenarios. The scenarios, drivers, and constraints provide a unique perspective for enterprise architects to compare the current architecture with future opportunities. Meanwhile, business innovation leaders gain systems knowledge of process, data, and system strengths and weaknesses. This collaboration provides a robust library of examples for leaders to use in developing business cases. When the time comes for project execution, the collaboration pays dividends by enabling early assessment of time to deliver, risks, and deployment dependencies. "The senior leadership advocacy of partnering enterprise architecture with innovation originators elevates ideas from isolated concepts into scalable, repeatable solutions that deliver enterprisewide value," says Robert Samuel, adjunct research advisor, IT Executive Programs (IEP) at IDC.