It’s summertime and for some that might mean lazy days by the water sipping a margarita, but for business leaders and innovators, the race to operational excellence doesn’t take a vacation. There’s a digital revolution going on right now and it’s time to join the movement or risk obsolescence. With so many disruptive trends constantly emerging, business leaders are facing a wide variety of issues and are under relentless pressure to stay ahead of the game. Success today requires continuous IT and business transformation, where everyone is consistently working toward increasing operational excellence, and becoming increasingly agile and innovative.

We all know natural phenomena’s, such as earthquakes, seismic activities, floods and hurricanes, are events that are unpreventable and out of our control.  Just as we are affected by those incidents, so are organizations. Therefore, it is important to be prepared to face those events as best as we can whilst trying to minimize their operational impact as much as possible. This is not unlike what Mexico City had to do in September 2017 when the city and its inhabitants went through one of the worst natural disaster to ever strike the country. Bizarrely, this occurrence coincided with the 32nd anniversary of the strongest earthquake in Mexican history.

Government activity and red tape go together like peanut butter and allergies (… you thought I was going to say jelly, didn’t you?) It all starts with positive expectations and good will, but sometimes a negative element develops along the way. Today’s government agencies must comply with numerous technology-focused regulations and legislation. While these regulations are put in place with the best intentions, meeting these requirements can often feel daunting and burdensome despite their potential to deliver positive outcomes.

 The cloud. It seems inevitable that we’re all headed there. Having the ability to rapidly access massive amounts of information over the Internet with minimal management effort is… well is pretty awesome.  The significant cost burden associated with managing a network and maintaining all the physical needs of a data center disappear when you remove this layer of IT management. CIOs, CTOs, and IT professionals recognize the numerous advantages of the cloud for business transformation; simply stated, they can focus time and talent on delivering the technologies that drive business capabilities while minimizing the distraction of maintaining infrastructure. If it sounds almost too good to be true, well…in the words of Yogi Berra “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.”    

It takes support from senior leadership and the right enterprise architecture tool to create an enterprise architecture (EA) program that becomes a powerful driver of growth, innovation, and business strategy. Fannie Mae, a leading source of financing for mortgage lenders has helped more than 50 million low- to middle-income families make homeownership a reality. The company has seen great success with their EA program illustrating that when done right, EA can help companies overcome some of their greatest challenges.

Adoption of the ArchiMate standard by the enterprise architecture world has grown rapidly in recent years. At the end of 2017 it made yet another step forward when it was approved by NATO for use with the NATO Architecture Framework [1]. What are the reasons for ArchiMate’s rise in popularity?