Enterprise architecture has a great deal to accomplish for organizations in 2024. What's on enterprise architects' Christmas lists this year?
Enterprise architecture is an increasingly important field for IT leaders and enterprise in general. With this increased value, enterprise architects are looking for support from customized toolsets and enterprise architecture management platforms.
With the year coming to an end, let's explore the capabilities enterprise architects will need to deal with what's to come in 2024. So, what's on enterprise architects' Christmas wish lists this year?
1 EA For Gen AI And Gen AI For EA
Everybody's talking about generative artificial intelligence (AI) and the new technology is already having a tremendous impact on the market. Almost immediately upon release, large language model (LLM) generative AI tools like ChatGPT were being used to save workers time by producing human-quality reports and documents instantaneously.
Yet, there are many more applications of LLMs than just the obvious. This includes translation, sentiment analysis, and even coding.
It's no wonder that enterprise is looking to incorporate LLM tools into IT landscapes. This has led to the emergence of the new field of LLM operations (LLMOps).
LLMOps practitioners will need to have a technical understanding of both their organization's IT landscape and the generative AI technology and market, as well as their company's business strategy and goals. As such, enterprise architects are perfectly positioned to support this new field.
An enterprise architecture management platform like LeanIX will store much of the information that LLMOps needs to confidently implement LLM tools into their application portfolio. LeanIX can even support you in building a target LLM landscape, and a road map to get there.
READ: LLMOps - Is Your Enterprise Architecture Function Ready?
That isn't the end of the story, however...
Gen AI For EA
Just as LLM and generative AI (gen AI) are benefitting other fields and industries, enterprise architects (EAs) can also leverage the new technology to help them in their work. Gen AI can support EAs with low-effort daily tasks to give them more time to concentrate on creative and strategic work.
Enterprise architecture work that gen AI can support includes:
- Completing architecture documentation
- Creating criteria for RFP success
- Identifying successor technologies
- Proposing replacement software
- Preparing recommendations for the board
This leaves enterprise architects in the unique position of leveraging generative AI in order to support enterprise in the adoption of generative AI. Key for enterprise architects in 2024 will be both AI tools to support their work, and the ability to support the adoption of LLMOps throughout their organization.
To find out more about how we're working with generative AI, book a demo:
2 Data Quality
"CIOs need to go beyond thinking and talking about information as the new oil. Information has unique economic characteristics that render it potentially much more valuable to their business than any fossil fuel."
Data is the most important resource enterprise has in the digital age. The market is in constant flux and you can no longer simply draw on past experience to understand how to succeed.
To safely navigate your company through turbulent waters, decision-makers must understand the current and future states of their organization and the market, and the trends and patterns that will guide them around the pitfalls on the horizon. They can only do that with extensive data from which to derive a strategy.
Yet, data is heavily regulated and under public scrutiny. Gathering accurate and comprehensive data, managing it in a way that complies with regulation, and analyzing it to derive true insight that supports strategic decision-making goes beyond simple data science and into true data intelligence.
Bad data leads to bad decisions, and that is as true for enterprise architecture as anywhere else. This is why we've partnered with Collibra to integrate their intelligent Enterprise Data Catalog (EDC) into the LeanIX platform.
Using intelligent data unlocks faster and more-accurate decision-making for enterprise architects. That's going to be key for keeping pace with the speed of strategic change coming in 2024.
READ: LeanIX Platform Powers Up Data Governance With Collibra
3 To Cloud Or Not To Cloud?
Cloud storage and processing is commonly considered to be a great revolution for business that is essential for unlocking innovative technology. Still, 70% of digital transformations fail and many organizations are still trying to complete a cloud migration.
When those organizations cross that finish line, however, they're now seeing early adopters heading back in the other direction. This growing trend of returning to on-premise after a cloud migration is highlighted by 451 Research, who claim 48% of companies they surveyed have moved away from the cloud.
Is the cloud really not all it cracked up to be? Not at all, cloud is still incredibly beneficial for the majority of use cases... just not all of them.
In all the excitement of cloud's discovery, few stopped to consider whether it was right for their specific use case. As such, many companies have had to roll back cloud migrations due to data security, regulatory requirements, and performance issues that arose due to a rushed, poorly planned cloud migration.
This leaves enterprise architects and IT leaders asking for a simple answer to the question of whether their organization should move to the cloud or not. The answer is different for each case, which is why architects need a way to assess their IT landscape and application portfolio to see whether the cloud is right for them before they migrate.
That's why an enterprise architecture platform is going to be key in the coming months to help organizations conduct application modernization initiatives and cloud migration readiness assessments. This is the only way to get a clear answer to the question of whether to migrate.
4 Enterprise Architecture For IT Sustainability
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is becoming an increasing priority for regulators, consumers, and your own workforce. Since IT runs on electricity, it often falls on us to work to limit our organizations' carbon footprints.
Assessing your application portfolio for electricity consumption and sustainability is a natural task for enterprise architects, but where to start? The fourth item on enterprise architects' Christmas list is a way to log the sustainability of each of the applications in their portfolio.
This is why we teamed up with PwC to create an ESG capability map within the LeanIX platform. The ESG map allows you to plan your sustainability transformation using the existing data you already collect within LeanIX.
READ: Sustainable Enterprise Architecture For ESG Transformation
5 A Single Repository For Enterprise Architecture Information
The fifth and final item on enterprise architects' Christmas lists is one software tool that can handle all the above tasks, as well as everything else that they need to do to succeed. To modernize and innovate, while keeping pace with the speed of change, enterprise architects need the LeanIX platform to succeed.
To find out more about the value of LeanIX, download IDC's white paper:
