When an organization undergoes a significant strategic shift, it often necessitates a substantial digital transformation effort. This transformation is driven by the need to adapt or acquire new capabilities to meet evolving market demands. As a consequence, the organization’s architecture may undergo profound changes, including decommissioning legacy systems, introducing new systems, adjusting workflows, or even restructuring the organization itself. These changes are typically long-term endeavours due to their extensive impact on the business, posing challenges in terms of management.
In such large-scale transformations, architects play a crucial role in facilitating a smooth transition by developing a well-defined plan outlining how the architecture will evolve over time. This approach offers several advantages:
- Provides a Unified Plan – this ensures that all stakeholders have a common roadmap to follow
- Enhances Manageability – helps break down the transformation into manageable phases
- Timely Execution – ensures that the right activities are carried out at the appropriate stages of the transformation
- Risk Mitigation – helps identify and mitigate potential business risks
- Establishing Clear Milestones – provides tangible deliverables and goals throughout the transformation process
A practical approach often used in managing large changes like these is Transition Architecture Planning, inspired by concepts found in frameworks such as TOGAF ADM (in particular Phase E: Opportunities and Solutions). This approach promotes an iterative strategy to navigate complex transformations.
Before embarking on a digital transformation initiative, it’s essential to establish two critical elements:
- Baseline Architecture (As-Is) – this represents the current state of the organization’s architecture, which is operational at the present moment. This can be defined by analysing the existing operations within the organization.
- Target Architecture (To-Be) – the desired future state of the architecture is primarily shaped by strategic objectives aligned with the goals of the digital transformation. These objectives serve as the foundation upon which the future architecture is constructed.
Since the Target Architecture typically represents a long-term goal, it is susceptible to change. Therefore, it’s essential to strike the right balance in terms of detail, ensuring that it guides the transformation effectively without becoming overly complex and difficult to maintain as changes occur over time.
Working with only Baseline and Target Architectures can be challenging because the gap between them is often significant. Managing a transformation as a single, monumental leap is impractical. To address this, organizations can aim to deliver value incrementally and in phases, leveraging “Transition Architectures” as milestones toward the Target Architecture. These Transition Architectures provide an evolution of architectural descriptions towards the Target Architecture.
Starting from the Baseline Architecture, a series of deliverables are identified, each contributing to the realization of the Target Architecture. The guiding principle here is to focus on changes that deliver high-value outcomes, aligning with the organization’s business priorities. In large-scale transformations, these changes may involve multiple aspects such as system modifications, process adjustments, personnel training, or infrastructure modifications, which may be executed as separate projects.
The choice of viewpoints to describe the Transition Architecture depends on the specific transformation scenario. Architects select appropriate viewpoints based on their expertise to effectively communicate the transformation with stakeholders.
One useful viewpoint example is the “logical system landscape viewpoint,” which can illustrate interdependencies, information flows, and the systems in a given system landscape.
Understanding information flows between systems during a transformation is crucial for comprehending complexity and can highlight the need for collaboration between product and system owners. For instance, decommissioning a system may depend on the launch of other systems, or changes to a process may rely on the readiness of supporting systems.
In the case of digital transformations requiring several transitions, several logical system landscape views can be created to track progress towards the Target Architecture. Given the substantial timeframes often associated with such transformations, continuous reviews of the Target Architecture and adjustment of Transition Architectures are essential to maintain alignment.
In summary, adopting a Transition Architecture approach enhances the manageability of complex digital transformations. This approach fosters a shared understanding of deliverables over time among stakeholders, facilitates agility by delivering value incrementally, and provides a long-term guiding vision for the transformation.
Architecture Mindset 