Jonathan Dean, VP of Product at Orbus Software, explains how decentralising IT and embracing a ‘digital blueprint’ can support successful business transformation.

One of the great shifts in enterprise IT over recent years has been the demise of the traditional ‘IT department’. For many, central departments that had total control over IT decision-making won’t be a distant memory. Back then, IT governance and risk were managed via simple ‘granted’ or ‘denied’ funding decisions that always came out of IT regardless of the department proposing a new IT project.

Whatever its merits and drawbacks, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle – IT budget is no longer solely owned by a central, technical group. The agile mentality shift from ‘project’ to ‘product’ means a range of teams have an IT budget in the modern enterprise. This represents the decentralisation of not just IT spending decisions but also application development.

A significant case can be made for this decentralisation to go further. Historically, enterprise architecture (EA) has been a technical and siloed niche for specialist analysts to map out a business’s IT estate, understand where data flows between systems and ultimately ladder this work up to ensure that systems respond to business needs.

Today, however, there’s a requirement placed on EA to be more business-centric. Traditional enterprise architects are tasked with supporting the business in delivering strategic objectives by designing employee-facing or customer-facing experiences. But business leaders are seriously missing a trick if they limit collaboration in meeting these objectives. A shared vision for EA is the key to better, smarter business transformation.

Going all in on change management

Almost all businesses today are thinking and evolving in software-defined terms. It therefore makes sense to align technology roadmaps with overall strategic business aims. EA facilitates this – acting as a digital blueprint of an enterprise. Overall, the digital landscape, business strategy, processes, business applications, and technologies can all be pulled into this central view to understand interrelationships.

But that’s just the foundational use case. It’s through applied lenses that digital blueprints can be used to understand and carry out critical business functions. For instance, a digital blueprint can demonstrate compliance with specific regulations or even make compliance possible altogether. The incoming EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), for example, places a big requirement for organisations to put in place visibility of their ESG data and effectively trace business and IT changes to sustainability goals and ESG frameworks. A digital blueprint does this.

As well as supporting business transformation, a digital blueprint helps enterprises maximise the benefits of being cloud-native and digital-first. The process of application rationalisation, in which organisations assess an application portfolio to streamline operations and control IT budgets by deprecating outdated or underutilised applications, is essential to such success. A comprehensive, shared understanding of the business strategy and IT estate makes this possible.

Further gains from collaboration

Once a digital blueprint is established, there’s a massive opportunity for enterprises to arm multiple internal stakeholders with this singular, shared view to serve as a common platform for changing fundamental business elements and activities.

Improved internal processes and ways of working can lead to better outcomes for the customer and end-user experience.

Consider a scenario where a bank wants to reimagine a specific customer experience delivered through a certain channel. An enterprise architect can utilise a shared digital blueprint to engage with the relevant internal lead. The two can work together to understand current processes and customer journeys so elements can be redesigned to make a product or service delivery smoother – or introduce entirely new products and services.

The name of the game is enhancing overall customer experience across all business touchpoints. The digital blueprint can be further utilised to measure the impact of any changes in a data-driven way. Such examples illustrate the key role that digital blueprints play in upholding and excelling in delivering customer experience.

Of course, a digital blueprint needs to be flexible to suit the unique requirements of various business personas. In the C-suite alone, requirements vary. From the digital blueprint, a CEO is concerned about high-level strategy and insight into execution and alignment with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). A CTO may use a digital blueprint to identify technical debt to inform corresponding strategies.

Enterprises need to prioritise a digital blueprint tool that supports both use cases. The right tool will also boast integrations to support as wide a set of business end users as possible. To take one example, tools that integrate with software like ServiceNow enable an enterprise’s IT service management (ITSM) function to start feeding their data into the overall enterprise digital blueprint so that IT is pulling in the same direction as the rest of the business in a collaborative environment.

With the demise of centralised control of IT, traditional enterprise architects and their IT leaders are required to deploy soft power to sell the value of using and feeding into a shared digital blueprint. A SaaS-based platform for such a blueprint that integrates with the applications that teams are using every day will always make it easier to secure that buy-in.

Positioned for the future

Advances in generative AI over the last year have seen IT leaders rushing to integrate this technology into their organisations. The risks of not doing so – competitive challenges, continued inefficiencies and incomplete digital transformation projects – are substantial. On the flip side, generative AI itself poses risks that have to be mitigated. A digital blueprint helps IT teams manage these risks and enforces the necessary governance.

For enterprise leaders, a clear understanding of the current and future state of business strategy fuels improved identification of innovative opportunities to apply new technologies and processes. This culture of innovation contributes to the creation of long-term, sustained digital advantage by encouraging ongoing improvement and transformation.

Continual technology advances and shifting regulations make it impossible for businesses to opt to stand still and maintain the status quo. A digital blueprint is the best solution to capitalise on these advances while benefitting from more decentralisation of IT in a controlled manner.