April 24, 2016 / Dennis Holinka
Topic 7 – Evaluating Emerging Technologies, Innovations & Trends
This week's posts go over the Evaluating Emerging Technologies, Innovations & Trends, the various perspectives, and related reflections in the blog.
Post 2 – EA Innovation Cycle - Agile EA
The EA Innovation Cycle is the integration of innovation management back into the enterprise transformation process. In an earlier discussion review of the innovation cycle, I came to the conclusion that innovation separate from innovation would lead to sprawl. The various firms which I have consulted for have been examples of technical debt accumulation and obsolescence hoarding. The companies have accumulated so much technologies that the operational run rates of those old innovations have now become economic burdens to them. Light on maintenance have run over 75 percent and in some cases have approach over 80 percent in some of the companies. The question that should be asked is how can this happen in companies who are used to providing innovative solutions for their customer and have grown to the point as leaders in their respective industries. The answer lies in management processes that are isolated and unsustainable without integration with co-processes to balance the good and externalities that those processes produce.
Figure: Obsolescence based Technical Debt Accumulation from Innovation
The creation of every new innovation will have the unintended consequences of turning once innovative systems into deprecated technologies and applications. In that sense, the creation of one new innovation is the destruction of an old innovation that is in need of technical renewal. Any post innovation creation that doesn't handle the destructive removal or remediation of obsolete systems works to create technical debt similar to allowing errors in code or architectural issues. These bundled systems of code will begin to accrue interest just like poorly developed application. First, it is the transition to the obsolete state followed by technical debt accumulation. Does that mean we should become Luddites and refuse any new technology innovation or emerging changes? No, but it does mean we must purposely manage the transition of the deprecated systems to be on par with the state of the art. In order to proceed that way, we must utilize the transformation processes that are available to transition current state to future state. Fortunately for us, we have Enterprise Architecture processes which can integrate to coordinate the innovation management process with the EA transformation process for obsolete systems and get them to real time modern currency.
Figure: Innovation to EA integration - Agile EA
As illustrated, the coordination point between "Ideas and Initiatives" and the EA process is linked by way of campaigns emanating from strategy and vision leading to innovations from the business context and trends to the emerging technology ideas innovations to EA. The point in transition will require a portfolio assessment of the impact that the innovations can have on the entire enterprise architecture current state as the proofed innovations will represent the future state architecture and the implied need to remediate the deprecated and obsolete portfolio current state.
Figure: Innovation Impact Assessment to EA Portfolio for Applications and Technologies
The result of the assessment connection will allow for a more comprehensive and holistic analysis for the removal of technical debt by way of obsolescence. The innovation process can be integrated not only by way of process connection but can be made comprehensive by including it as part of an EA meta model for Agile EA so that modeling can be performed and tracked across the process as artifacts in architecture. The combination of the campaigns and ideas are related to the EA impacts and the portfolio that they contain so that no innovation is disconnected with the mission, goals, objectives, strategies, and initiatives that the enterprise must have by way of traceability and relatability to the firm's value proposition.
Figure: Innovation - Agile EA meta model
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