New trends in enterprise architecture: balancing agility and efficiency

It is a general rule that novel enterprise solutions come with a quick headstart, with a lot of room for movement and agility (see graph above). However, at a certain critical point, every solution starts to lean into its mature version, and the initial agility is being traded for efficiency and processes automation, warns seasoned enterprise architect Gerben Wierda.

As such, companies today face the complexities of multiple data storages, app interfaces and confusing dependencies. Every new digital revolution adds another layer, another abstraction and UI, with the promise to achieve the initial agility EA had in the beginnings.

However, simply migrating onto a new system is not at all easily feasible task, as what was working and built upon for decades, has accumulated enormous momentum, usually going in one direction. This momentum is given not just by the complex technology being used, but also by the people being accustomed to the tech stack. It has grown into everyday life, and changing it would be equivalent to moving thousands of workers to new offices.

It is no wonder most SaaS project focus on solely accompanying already existent solutions, improving or automating what’s there, by giving yet another layer, yet another tool. This is how the market has been maturing since the .com bubble. Nevertheles, it is now the right time to ask: can we go further? Or will the complexity increase with only incremental benefits?

The AI revolution seems to bring completely different challenges, not based on building and adapting to new technology, but rather on integrating the new (AI) into the old (legacy systems). AI is a tool that cannot work by itself, and needs a specialized team to

a. Find proper business use-cases in the existing company processes

b. Integrate it and fine-tune it on relevant data

c. Comply with regulatory standards to make sure AI is aligned with company’s values and goals.

As such, for maintaining and adapting new standards, it has never been more important to choose correctly a seasoned, professional IT a SW development team (on the contrary to the AI hype of replacing programming).

Author: Oldřich Příklenk

Picture: Chatgpt.com