Steps to Adopt while Integrating Emerging Technologies with Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architects are at the forefront to spot new technology trends, but also understand and analyze the impact of these emerging technologies. What are the necessary steps that enterprise architects can adopt to integrate these budding technologies into an organization's existing business ecosystem?

Fremont, CA: Successful companies built on profitable business ecosystems are those, which integrate emerging technologies into their business landscape. Enterprise architects are at the forefront to spot new technology trends, but also understand and analyze the impact of emerging technologies. They can align innovation efforts with the business strategy, make strategic recommendations, assess business opportunities thoroughly, and provide visibility into the impact on IT systems. 

To understand how emerging technologies can be integrated into the existing business ecosystem of an organization, enterprise architects can follow three simple steps, as explained below.

Step 1: Recognize Emerging Technologies

It is crucial to identify the technologies that may represent a potential opportunity for the business. To find emerging technologies, one can rely on market research, workshops, or vendor innovations. 

Technology radar is greatly useful to get a holistic view of technologies spotted by your organization. To create the technology radar, one should be well versed with its key components. The area of the radar can be broken down by technology domain, the distance to the center of the radar can represent the strategic alignment of the technology, the bubble size can be the business impact, and the color of the bubble, the risk inherent to the technology.

To build the radar, one can conduct a number of workshops in your organization gathering business and IT leaders. You can then revise it on a frequent basis.

Step 2: Create Business Opportunities

After identifying the potential budding technologies, one can assess business opportunities related to them. With the use of ideation tools, drawing an outline on how these technologies can bring value to your organization is the next step. Specific techniques such as design thinking for the process of innovations, application of convergent and divergent ideas to create a minimum viable product can also be used. After these techniques are employed, subsequent iterations that follow these steps are utilized to refine and fine-tune the product and its business model. 

Step 3: Understand how to transform the business

Enterprise Architecture offers numerous tools to assess the impacts and transform businesses. 

Business capability maps to assess the impact on the current business:

By interlinking emerging technologies to business capabilities, enterprise architects can seamlessly evaluate the effect of a technology transformation, may it be a minor or major impact on the existing capabilities of the technology, or any features that have become obsolete due to this technology.

Understand the value brought to customers by the value streams: 

The value stream defines the stages that are required for customer satisfaction. While trying out business capabilities in each step of the value stream, one must ensure that organizations can deliver the expected value to customers. In the case of missing capabilities, identification of the actions required to develop new capabilities is needed. 

Define the business model with Business Model Canvas: 

Business Model Canvas is a template utilized to develop new business models. It comprises of various items such as the value proposition, cost structure, customer segments, channels, and revenue streams. It assists the leaders in discussing a business model and helps refine it.

Understand model business processes and customer Journeys: 

Customer journey maps are tools that allow the leaders to understand all the touchpoints that exist among the customers and the organization during the purchasing experience. As the journey unveils, the customer will mark satisfaction or dissatisfaction about the product and service. With the feedback mapped from customer journeys, one can model the related business processes that fulfill all the touchpoints in the customer journey map.