Business driven enterprise architecture is currently a hot topic!

Hi all,

Last week we attended Executive IT event organized by Management Events in Helsinki. The event had approximately 350 delegates attending + an additional 150 vendor representatives. We had 30 scheduled meetings with delegates. Additionally we had a chance to discuss with another 30 delegates during the day. Our customer Lassila & Tikanoja gave a case presentation about business driven enterprise architecture project that we had done jointly during H2 2013. Presentation topic was “Towards business driven solutions using enterprise architecture”. Despite the late time after 4 PM and six parallel presentations the topic attracted over 100 delegates to the audience. Once again I want to thank Petri Kuismin for the excellent presentation.

Based on all dialogues during the day it became obvious that the interest and need for business driven enterprise architecture is high and constantly growing. Why is that? There are probably several factors but here is my main thoughts. First of all the economy has been tough in the western world since the financial crises in 2008. Traditionally there has been an upswing shortly after the crisis and companies have gotten back to the usual growth path without any radical development programs. The world, however, has changed. Six years later we are still waiting for economic growth. It seems that companies have finally realized that this time the economic growth may not come as before and rescue them but they have to take their destiny in to their own hands. In practice it means that companies must achieve more with less. In order to do that business driven enterprise architecture has proven to be a good approach. Another important factor for the genuine interest towards QPR’s business driven enterprise architecture must be the customer maturity. Enterprise architecture as such is not a new thing. However, it has and still often is misused for describing technical architecture work. That is neither business driven or enterprise level approach. It definitely has not delivered the expected business outcome and benefits. Most of the customers have already had these bad experiences from IT focused projects that didn’t deliver the expected results and were ignored by the business. Now they are looking for alternative approaches and vendors “who get it”. After they here about QPR's business driven approach and methodology the response is very positive “This is exactly what we have been looking for”.

Matti Erkheikki

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/matti-erkheikki/2/302/b35