Skills for Sustainable Enterprise Architectures in a VUCA World

Abstract.

Our understanding of enterprise architecture (EA) is evolving from  EA as a way to align business and information technology to EA as enabler of  organizational innovation and sustainability. This perspective fits the new  realities of today’s global business environment, which can be described through the acronym VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and  Ambiguity). In a VUCA world, it is extremely important to create EAs that are  sustainable, i.e. that can last a long time and evolve in response to internal and  external changes. The new VUCA world and the need for sustainable yet agile  EAs create new requirements for EA skills that will be valuable in the future. In  this paper, we present an exploratory conceptual study of VUCA characteristics  and skills in the context of sustainable EA. Our contributions are the new  conceptualization of the skills and of the approaches that enterprise architects  can use to develop these new skills.

Introduction

An enterprise architecture (EA) includes the strategy plans, organizational charts,  procedural instructions to business process models, application landscape and  network plans as well as software structure and data models that help an organization  maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of its information technology (IT) while minimizing the risk [1]. An EA attempts “to optimize across the enterprise the often fragmented legacy of processes (both manual and automated) into an integrated  environment that is responsive to change and supportive of the delivery of the  business strategy” [2]. A good EA can help companies create synergies from an integrated IT strategy, respond to changing business needs though innovation, and  ultimately achieve competitive advantage [2]. This alignment of IT and business objectives has helped establish the importance of EA for both theory and practice.  The understanding of the EA term is continuously evolving, and it now encompasses  three schools of thought with different belief systems, definitions, assumptions and  implications: enterprise IT architecting (which views EA as the glue between business  and IT), enterprise integrating (which views EA as the link between strategy and execution), and enterprise ecological adaptation (which views EA as the means for  innovation and sustainability) [3].  

Enterprise architects are central members of an EA team and play a leading role in  achieving the EA goals by ensuring the EA completeness (addressing the concerns of  all stakeholders) and integrity (linking different perspectives, reconciling differences,  and explaining tradeoffs) [2]. Enterprise architects need skills to gather and articulate  a vision, coach and lead others, liaison between the business and technical groups,  and operate with complex technology and industry concepts [2]. Since the EA  development process can be very complex, and involve many actors (stakeholders,  business executives and middle managers, project managers, designers, etc.),  enterprise architects need to make sense of this complexity, identify critical details to  concentrate on, adopt a practical view and develop fit-for-purpose (rather than  theoretical) architectures. Thus, they need inductive rather than deductive skills as  well [2].  

The job of the enterprise architect is becoming increasingly difficult because the nature of today’s business environment is more dynamic than ever before – defying  confident diagnosis and full of traps to navigate [4, 5]. As the environment is no  longer easy to understand and complex cooperation and interaction networks emerge,  companies find it hard to plan their actions in line with pre-determined static  objectives. A way to describe these turbulent environmental conditions and their  oftentimes destabilizing effects for organizations is through the acronym VUCA  (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity). VUCA was first coined by the  U.S. military in the 1990’s and is now used by business leaders throughout the world [4, 5, 6, 7]. Volatility refers to unstable situations and unpredictable change (in nature,  speed, volume, magnitude, and dynamics) [4, 5]. Uncertainty refers to a lack of  relevant information necessary to predict effects or actions – truths considered to be  undeniable are no longer valid and executives can no longer base their decisions on  past events. Complexity refers to situations that have many interconnected parts and  massive amounts of information, creating a complex set of conditions in which cause-effect relationships and long-term effects become very complicated. Finally, ambiguity refers to situation where there is doubt about the nature of a relationship,  particularly the cause-and-effect dynamic of that relationship. This ambiguity is  sometimes caused by situational newness and the doubt that can occur when trying to  make decisions within this new context [4, 5, 6, 7]. The main difference between  complexity and ambiguity is that ambiguity most often involves change – so that the  “rules of the game” become unknown. For example, moving into foreign markets is a complex situation that involves managing numerous, new and multipart rules and  regulations. Moving from print to digital media, however, is an ambiguous situation,  since the customers’ behavior in the new technology environment is not fully known [5].  

In a VUCA world, it is extremely important to create sustainable EAs –  architectures that are long-living, but can be efficiently maintained and evolved [8, 9]  and thus can endure and “tolerate changes resulting from shifts in requirements, environment, technologies, business strategies and goals” [10]. Sustainability of EAs can be viewed from five perspectives – economic (effects on value creation/profitability), environmental (effects on natural ecosystems and resources),  individual (effects on individual well-being), social (effects on equity, justice, etc.),  and technical (longevity of the system) [10]. Sustainable EAs fit the enterprise  ecological adaptation conceptualization of EA [3]. They can help increase corporate  agility – the ability to adapt to the unexpected changes of the VUCA environment– by positively impacting a company’s time to market, flexibility, innovation, quality and profitability [9].  

Thus, the new VUCA world and the need for sustainable yet agile EAs create new  requirements for EA skills that are future-proof. However, according to Bob  Johansen, a distinguished fellow with the Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley,  confusion about VUCA is paramount: “If you are not confused, you’re not paying attention” [11]. Academics echo this opinion, finding that the VUCA definition is  unclear, which in turn leads to a lack of information around the skills needed for a  VUCA world [5].  

To shed light on these issues, we present the results of a conceptual study – a “non-empirical study of ideas related to real objects” [12] intended to build an exploratory  framework for VUCA characteristics and skills for sustainable EA. The methodology  involves identifying the knowledge gap, adopting a conceptual exploratory method,  identifying relevant books and peer-reviewed articles, extracting the key concepts and  conducting snowball-type searches to find other concepts/ideas, analyzing and synthesizing the concepts, and proposing an exploratory framework [12]. The  contributions of the paper are a) the first (to our knowledge) conceptualization for  VUCA skills in general and EA skills in a VUCA world in particular and b) practical  recommendations for methods, tools and frameworks for developing these new skills.