What is Digital and why Digital Architecture?

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The term ‘digital’ is often used by technology professionals to express concepts relating ‘IT enablement’, but beyond this, there is no common or generally agreed definition.

A definition for digital that I often use is : 

Exploiting technology to create user-centric experiences and data driven decisions, leading to more new or improved business models
   "technology" – which are typified by Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and IoT as well as emerging technology such a Blockchain
   "user-centric experiences" – business services work how the user wants them to, not the organisation
   "data-driven decisions" – using systems to provide real-time  performance information to inform decisions
   "new or improved business models’ – quite simply, this is all about enabling a business to do new things in new ways or existing things in better ways in order to see it's business goals

It wasn’t long ago when IT was regarded as primarily a back-office service, only providing payroll and HR systems as well as office productivity tools.  

We can now say that it’s no longer possible to do business effectively, or provide services without IT at the centre of the business model.
So, these are exciting, yet challenging times ahead for organisations who are still learning how to respond to the complex demands precipitated by the digital agenda:

•   Exploiting data through analytics and Artificial Intelligence is a critical differentiator in any business, using technology to ensure that data provides the insight needed to inform business decisions can enable business success through differentiation in the marketplace as well as by being more operationally efficient
•   Fundamental changes in business models which have previously worked for decades, but are now are crumbling under technology disruption
•   Labour-intensive, manual internal processes previously tolerated are now increasingly under scrutiny as organisations seek ever greater efficiencies
•   Demands from customers to transact and interact via a seamless digital experience
•   Security concerns increase as more services are exposed to the internet.  Data becomes at the same time, more valuable and more vulnerable.
•   Needing to “keep the show on the road”, supporting legacy applications, not built for this new world, but still crucial to the running of the business

Responding to this agenda can have a very wide scope and need to incude the IT enablement of ‘everything’ (front office and back). Hence, many leading organisation are accelerating their Digital Transformation journey.

It goes without saying that digital transformation is enabled by digital technology, but there are a number oftechnical factors that increase the challenge:
•   High-impact IT change – the scope and aspiration of digital transformation change tends to be high, impacting internal and external processes, that may require fundamental architectural changes.
•   Digital channel shift – customers expect to access services seamlessly on their browsers and smart device apps
•   Complicated product eco-system – digital capabilities are often enabled via many interoperable products conforming to open standards, as well as traditional large, single-stack applications.
•   Legacy is still here - a lot of core functionality and data remains locked up in legacy applications and architectural designs will be expected to address this.
•   Design reluctance - Agile techniques that often come with digital deliveries tend to bring a reluctance to do 'big design' (traditional architecture) - leading to uncontrolled, hacking and rebuilding of legacy.
•   Risk of rebuilding legacy – lack of design or focus on outright speed can result in rebuilding of inflexible corporate apps.
•   New security threats – from opening up businesses processes for self-service via digital channels

Getting the most from Digital Transformation requires reframing the business as a set of rationalised services that can be provided and consumed digitally.

Traditional Enterprise Architecture needs to evolve into a new Digital Architecture that is a refinement of tried and trusted Enterprise Architecture techniques, developing new knowledge and experience of digital solutions to speed the process.  

The key features of this new Digital Architecture are:
•   converting business visions into a set of digital capabilities using business architecture approaches
•   applying a library of digital patterns and principles to accelerate design options 
•   draw upon our target digital reference architectures in order to further speed formation of end-state designs
•   set up and engender agile ways of working that align and support agile teams, encouraging design by collaboration
•   formation of governance approaches which recognise the need for design discipline, but aim to devolve decisions to the lowest appropriate level.


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