Technology architecture for company 2.0

Technology enabled new businesses and companies (think Uber in last mile logistics) and the promise of digital transformation, and organizations hence increasingly seek out how technology, and technology architecture for the enterprise can be a springboard for a transformed company or company 2.0- doing new businesses or doing its existing business in a manner that should (as the thought goes) scarcely resemble the existing way of doing so. From a personal, and sometimes vicarious, experience in such initiatives, here are a few pointers on how technology architectures can be made to enable a transformed company
• It has to start with strategy 2.0- the foundation has to lie on how the company can serve its existing customer better, or new customer segments better, or new/existing segments in an entirely different way than competitors do. If it’s a new industry that is being considered as the blue ocean, what strengths can be brought to fore. Technology is an important part of this conversation as to the possibilities it enables
• Business architecture 2.0- Now that the strategy is discussed and sufficiently clear, what business capabilities are needed to action on the strategy need to be evolved. This involves crystallising the business functions and processes, from both a customer’s perspective and from an internal perspective related to acquiring, fulfilling and servicing the customer. This also includes what processes need to redesigned, created new, let go. A sufficient impression of how technology can enable these processes is necessarily created at this stage
• Functional architecture 2.0- this deals with identifying what processes are core and non-core, the functions that they span through and the functional components/functional capabilities that are needed to execute these functions. At this stage, now that we know what the processes are and their divergence from existing processes, and the new, modified, stay as they are functional components, a detailed analysis of existing technology capabilities should be done. This should be done from a perspective of technology capabilities serving existing capabilities, processes and functions
• Technology component architecture 2.0- this relates to which pieces of technology, technology components are needed for the functional architecture 2.0. We are dealing here with technology spaces and capabilities that these technology spaces provide (think customer relationship management, campaign and content management, and analytics for profitably fulfilling inventory of slots for say a wellness and grooming company) and not yet at the stage of identifying technology vendors, specific technologies and frameworks. At this stage, we also detail and articulate the gaps between existing and the proposed/needed technology capabilities. Technology benchmarking, not necessarily with same industry competitors, should also be undertaken at this stage, as needed
• Technology crystallisation, layering of technology across the enterprises- now that the gaps are known, the analysis of what needs to be purchased new, re-engineered or re-platformed from existing, improvements and upgrades to existing, is done. We now have a criteria of what each technology component should do, the functional architecture piece has enabled us to understand how the technology components will interact and integrate, and the technology pieces can now be layered and put together. Conscious decisions are taken on existing pieces of technology and considered evaluation is done for new pieces to be acquired
• Roadmap the technology architecture 2.0- with a detailed cognisance of the technology transformation being considered, the new technology architecture can now be road mapped in line with the road map of business capabilities needed and how these can be staggered. Any business cases and ROI justifications are done here and technology longevity considerations are made. The implementation of the road map, well done, will realise the technology transformation piece for the company 2.0 journey. A well ordained technology architecture 2.0 for company 2.0 is the end result