This year’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida explored strategic trends and technologies that are shaping the future of IT and business. Attendance was strong, and attendees were energetic and passionate about learning, networking, and sharing their ideas and opinions. Thousands of CIOs and senior IT executives came together in October to discuss topics including data and analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, culture, digital transformation, modernization, cybersecurity, and customer experience.

In the digital era, IT modernization has become a critical topic and stresses the benefits of moving to new technologies, such as cloud computing, removing aging technologies, and consolidating the IT landscape. However, the prioritization of modernization projects are still often performed based on IT objectives, rather than on business objectives, leading to a misalignment between business and IT.  This is where enterprise architecture can come into play and helps modernize IT.

Nuclear plants in Europe and North America cost significantly more than the ones in Asia and Middle East. According to a study by the UK’s Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), the competitiveness of new nuclear plants could benefit from greater focus on project governance as a means of reducing delivery costs. How can an effective enterprise architecture help?

It’s a wrap! The Enterprise Architecture Summit 2018 is over, making it the second Enterprise Architecture (EA) event in the Philippines this year! The theme was “Pragmatic Approaches to EA”, and methods and best practices to prepare EA for digital transformation were discussed.

Being product-centric is at the core of the agile discipline; It comes along with the notion of Minimum-Viable Product (MVP^[1]). To support MVPs, architects are struggling to provide corresponding MVAs: Minimum Viable Architectures. In the introduction to this series on agile, we have mentioned that MVPs are scoped around the mantra that smaller is better. It sounds compelling to apply the same principle to MVAs: Minimum Viable Architectures become small chunks of architectures that can address MVPs. MVAs are then refined through iteration cycles along with MVPs. Sounds great, right?

There’s a lot at stake when it comes to planning for the future of IT, innovation, and business growth. It’s no longer acceptable that an investment in IT helps maintain the status quo. IT investments, and the people managing them, are now expected to have superhuman powers that transform business, ignite innovation, and fuel growth. With so much expected from IT, now is the perfect time to put forth the effort and elevate your enterprise architecture (EA) program.