While analyst groups like Gartner, have spent a lot of time analyzing IoT. Their research director, Mike Walker said:

“Enterprise architects have a great opportunity to position themselves at the heart of digital businesses. this catched my imagination wild, where do we engage next ? so here is my synopsis for you. 

So far, everyone has touched on the booming IoT trend, the associated risks, and how enterprise architecture systems will help overcome those is a GRAY area ?

Here is a usual business scenario ..

Use Case: Business Problem of a Thailand Retail Food Chain 

A customer with a smartwatch and an app for restaurant walks into a thai food store, triggering the app to automatically order their ‘usual’ and debit the users bank account. However, restaurant has recently changed menu and price, perhaps as soon as the day before, and the customers order is no longer available.

Without the foresight of good preparation and efficient systems, that customer would order something that no longer exists, be billed for that order and be left waiting for their usual order indefinitely, most likely resulting in an unhappy customer who might even think twice about using your services in the future.

what do you loose ?

  •  Considering the internet’s scope and the breadth of data accessible in it, unhappy customers are nowhere near a worst case scenario.
  • Due to the automated nature of the devices, most data is transferred both mutually (both ways) and automatically.
  • Therefore, any adopters of the technology are placing their trust into the business that the data they share is being used and stored responsibly.
  • But these devices can be subject to cyber attack, and with IoT devices penetrating a multitude of sectors, including hospitals and traffic systems to name but two, the prospect of such attacks is very worrying indeed.
  • The two way passage IoT devices create between business and consumer is what makes the tech so valuable. For large enterprises, let alone the potential loss of or duplicated and stolen data.

Opportunities for Enterprise Architects

The big opportunity lies in transformation from integrator of solutions to integrator and provider of services. Here are few suggested Iteration from Enterprise Architecture framework.

EA Iteration  for to Technology Clusters adds one more SOA for “Design for Digital”

Conventional Business Drivers, Matrix , Business Technology agenda shift towards Digital Transformation , Digital Spinal Cord , Digital Enterprise Architecture , Digital Enterprise and most important Think Design. There are 9 iteration considerations, I suggest as per EA framework –

  1. Conventional EA Building Blocks extended from 17 Building Blocks to 37 Building Blocks , 7 Design principles , 30 Trends
  2. Architecting Invisible Infrastructure like Virtual Lego ,What Would Amazon Do, Bon Risk Appetite , Let’s Get Physical and Orchestrate for Simple
  3. Architecting Design for Digital Building Block has views on The Cloud , In Crowd , In SMAC or Internet Business etc
  4. Architecting SOA Sector As A Service like Enterprise Candy Store , Elastic Business , Close To The Edge , No Apps Apps
  5. Thriving On Data Building Blocks with viewpoints like Data Bigger , Intelligence , Real Real Time , The Art Of Data , Data Apart Together etc]
  6. Architecting Process Transformation: On The Fly 1. Shades Of Process ,  Process Is The New App , No Process , String of Silos , Co-Process
  7.  Architecting Collaboration building blocks like for Social , Promote User Profile As A Currency , Social Workers etc
  8. Architecting User Experience View Points like Object Of Desire , Zen Of The Task , Sweat The Assets , Bring Your Office Device , End User and End Producer etc
  9. Improvement of content meta model (streams) – Data vs Information, Business Agility & Governance with Easy / Pragmatic / Focused on ROI

 Summary

EA value starts when he is able to transform Information of everything Shift from the “thing” to composition. As TOGAF Phase E Opportunities and Solutions will shift its gears into Convergence and Next-level business with Baseline and Target Architecture Gap Analysis. EA Iteration gives opportunities to define overlay –

  • Aeronautics :Initialized contextual artifacts
  • Finance : overlays per sub domain (Retail Banking …)
  • Insurance, Retail : Atleast 1 overlay is enough
  • Utilities : CRM domain overlay and Business domain decomposition
  • Infrastructure : Establish Model in EA of all the components that can be used in an information system.
  • Telco: Business domain decomposition Overlay
  • Transport :One deliverable example with Business Domain, IS Services, Logical Components & Physical Mapping
  • Mobile, Security, Automotive, Tax, Outsourcing , Life-science

 

Saurabh Katiyar

1500, Sunday 2 September 2018