Capgemini has chosen to partner with LeanIX to support our customers in transitioning to a culture of continuous transformation. Capgemini VPs, Vikram Rajan and Paritosh Sharma explain why enterprise architecture management is key.
The pace of change is escalating beyond what we would have thought possible even 20 years ago, and it isn't slowing down. From new technology to catastrophic world events, organizations must become able to adapt to the unexpected to survive.
Organizations are changing their approaches to innovation in response. A 2020 research paper by Capgemini revealed that 67% of organizations say they actively promote the exploration of new ideas and experimentation, up from only 35% in 2018.
Even with the best of intentions though, digital transformations are difficult to execute and often conclude without a return on investment. Time and again, we at Capgemini see the same reasons for failures:
- A lack of vision and strategy that's shared by all stakeholders
- Siloed and disconnected execution teams and a division between IT and the rest of the business
- Poorly defined scope and impact analysis leading to unforeseen problems
- Unfit legacy technology and processes that hinder progress
- Inability to execute at speed and scale by breaking down the process into manageable steps
The solution to all of these issues is to stop thinking about digital transformation. What enterprise needs is so much more than just a large-scale technology upgrade.
Rather, organizations need to adapt, not just their technology, but also their company culture, people, and processes to a climate of continuous transformation and ongoing renewal.
As inspirational martial artist and filmmaker, Bruce Lee, once put it:
“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
"Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
Bruce Lee
When the world around your organization keeps changing, you must make your business ready to become whatever the market needs it to be at any moment. You must become free of rigidity and pretension.
This is what continuous transformation means. It's so much more than just a move to digital solutions.
Sustainability for continuous transformation
To succeed, enterprise needs to make a cultural change to a system of continuous transformation. For that to work, it must also be sustainable.
Transformation isn't easy and it requires energy and resources. To maintain continuous transformation, you must be wary of running out of either, but also of making sure the whole word has enough left over.
Sustainability includes both the practicalities of keeping your business running through transformation, but also a responsibility to the environment and society as a whole.
The three pillars of sustainability are:
- Environmental sustainability — reducing the carbon footprint
- Economic sustainability — maintaining long-term profitability
- Social sustainability — earning the support of your entire organization and society as a whole
Achieving sustainable continuous transformation involves more than just your IT team performing a technology upgrade. Everyone must be involved and able to adapt, becoming "like water".
To guide this, we at Capgemini support the need for business or enterprise architects. These bring together every aspect of change from the obvious technology transformation, to the transformation of people, processes, and sustainability.
Enterprise architects are value-driven, outcome-focused people managers. A great enterprise architect will have:
- technical knowledge
- business understanding
- the ability to influence people
- decision-making skills
- experience with architecture and delivery methods
- mastery of scaled agile
They should be embedded into existing teams, supporting them across every aspect and the three phases of transformation:
Think — discover pain points, define business needs and create the business case. The value proposition must be aligned to a clear business strategy.
Build — develop proof-of-concept processes and deliver new capabilities, products, and services. Foster an agile mindset and implement agile methods. Ensure progress is measurable and can be tracked throughout the journey.
Operate — support business change, then improve the performance of the new processes and technologies
Working through these stages in collaboration with the teams they're embedded into, enterprise architects can drive continuous transformation for your business. Yet, to do so, they must adopt the mindset of an enterprise architect.
Capgemini Requirements For The Enterprise Architecture Model
To adopt the enterprise architect model and drive continuous transformation for your business, your embedded enterprise architects need to achieve three goals:
- Become post-transformational by changing your organization's culture to accommodate continuous transformation. Organizational buy-in will be required at all levels to succeed. It is important to consider the current skills of team members and design a plan to closes the skills gap.
- Deliver completely by joining the dots to deliver the right outcomes for your organization. A good operating model should break down silos and encourage collaboration and sharing of data across business functions to achieve greater business agility.
- Build your core with the right products and methods to set your enterprise up for success.
It's at point three that we at Capgemini are eager to bring LeanIX in. The LeanIX enterprise architecture management (EAM) platform allows your enterprise architects to leverage technology that supports them in making decisions and manage change with an outcome-driven approach.
We feel that their flexible data model offers enterprise architects a best-practice model that will work as the foundation to meet the future business needs of continuous transformation. That's why we've chosen to partner with LeanIX to further the development of our enterprise and business architecture and continuous transformation model.
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