The desire of organizations to sense and respond to changes in business patterns will have a profound impact on the scope, techniques and mind-sets of enterprise architecture (EA) practitioners. Enterprise architects should use this research to understand how their role in the enterprise will change.

• While many of the concepts described herein are not new, when combined, they represent a significant shift from traditional thinking about EA.
• The focus of EA will move beyond the four walls of the business and into the extended enterprise.
• The speed at which EA changes must match the speed at which the business is changing.

• Extend the definition of the enterprise outside the "four walls" of the business.
• Shift your architectural focus away from standardization toward enablement of continuous change.
• Stop thinking about EA in terms of control and standards — start thinking about how to influence relationships.
• Scan for environmental volatility, continuously adapting internal and external business patterns in response to opportunity and threat signals.
• Learn new analytical techniques like systems thinking, scenario planning, game theory and value network analysis that will help you visualize and analyze shifting business patterns.

This report is part of a new research theme on "Pattern-Based Strategy." This research explores the factors, approaches and technologies that can enable business leaders to actively seek, amplify, examine and exploit patterns. Seeking patterns will require new disciplines and technologies that identify patterns of change that indicate opportunity or risk. We suggest that clients read "Introducing Pattern-Based Strategy" as an introduction to this topic theme.

The economic environment emerging from the current economy will force business leaders to look at their opportunities for growth and competitive differentiation in a new way. To date, the strategic use of information has been limited to very conventional approaches that only provide obvious indicators of considerations like economic health, emerging market opportunities, buyer preferences and new channels to market.

The networked, global marketplace provides some compelling incentives for reinventing the business models of the last 50 years. There are some new sources of information and influence that have to be considered and exploited: the wisdom of crowds, the power of an individual blogger to impact a company's image, the fact that consumers now buy as communities and the potential demise of classic functions, such as product design, because consumers are designing their own products.

Pattern-Based Strategy enables business leaders to actively seek, amplify, examine and exploit new or novel business patterns. In order to support Pattern-Based Strategy, organizations must begin to understand in which activities they are investing, and how these investments need to be changed or adjusted to enable them to exploit new patterns within their own business as well as new patterns of signals coming from external sources that indicate a business opportunity or threat.

In order to respond to these changing conditions, the enterprise of the future will need to develop and expand some characteristics that are not common in enterprises today:

1. Lightweight — The enterprise will need to cultivate a lightweight approach to dealing with the unexpected. A resilient approach to risk will be required, allowing the organization to adapt to disruptions rather than seeking to avoid them. Most will adopt a portfolio approach to strategy, allowing them to make many small bets on the future, rather than a few large bets. Today, most enterprises are focused on defining operations with an eye toward achieving a predictable steady state.
2. Network-centric — The enterprise will need to be more externally focused in its relationships to markets and ecosystems. It will need to share enterprise information and provide transparency across dynamically changing networks of partners and customers. It will also need to embrace a new approach, "co-opetition," determining what to actively commoditize versus what to differentiate.
3. Dynamic decision making — The enterprise will need to dynamically shift decision making back and forth between command-and-control and "power to the edge." It will need to seek and accommodate input from the "collective." This will increase the emphasis on trust relationships — both within the enterprise and without.
4. Business and IT unification — The enterprise of the future will not differentiate between "the business" and "IT" and then expend effort to "align" them, but, rather, will recognize that IT is an intrinsic component of the business and should not be regarded separately.
5. Focus on the upside of risk — Enterprises will need to become less "afraid to fail," but will learn to fail (and recover) faster. This will require that they develop better capabilities to actively monitor and mitigate risks.

The need for enterprises to seek, model and adapt to changes in the environment will require some fundamental changes in the practice of enterprise architecture. We have always defined EA as "the process of translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change" (see "Gartner Clarifies the Definition of the Term 'Enterprise Architecture'"), but changes in the nature of the enterprise, its network and the speed with which both are changing will require enterprise architects to acquire new skills and shift their mind-set. While the underlying process of architecture will not change, the scope, techniques and mind-set required of architects will need to be dramatically different if they are to be successful. As business begins to value the ability to change and respond appropriately to exceptions that occur at both the strategic and operational levels, architects will have to move away from a mind-set that prizes standardization and control to an approach that enables the business to sense and respond more quickly and more accurately than in years past.

Many of the concepts and technologies that enable Pattern-Based Strategy are not new, but the idea of integrating them together is. The challenge will be combining these concepts to provide the enterprise with the tools it needs to seek external signals, analyze and interpret the data to model responses, and rapidly adapt. The combinatorial power of each of the concepts outlined in the body of this note represents a significant shift from traditional thinking about EA.

Many of the behaviors and skills that we call out in this research are also not new. We have urged architects for many years to focus on facilitation, communication and interpersonal skills (see "Top EA Challenges are People and Business Issues"), and to concentrate on the interactions both within and outside the enterprise (see "Using 'EA Lite' to Architect for Innovation: Principles and Best Practices"). In one sense, Gartner was sending weak signals about the need to change the direction of EA; the current shift in the business climate requires architects to acknowledge the changing business pattern and adapt to it.

The business environment (for commercial business, nonprofits and government) has fundamentally changed. Rather than emphasizing a "stand-alone," self-sufficient enterprise, today's economic climate favors a high degree of collaboration with business partners, suppliers, customers, regulators and others. Those organizations that are successful are those that are able to cooperate with others in loosely coupled, frequently changing relationships. These relationships will often include cooperation in business processes. They will certainly involve frequent, seamless exchanges of information. This changes the scope of the "enterprise" that one is architecting, as it is less focused on the internals within the metaphorical "four walls" of the business, and more focused on how information can be exchanged and cooperative processes can be executed with other entities.

For enterprise architects, this is a significant shift in thinking. They now need to think about deriving common standards for information sharing and process execution with other parties who have an equal say in the outcome. Rather than focus on the things that make the enterprise operate efficiently inside, they must focus on things that allow the enterprise to collaborate effectively with others. Focus on people, process and information across the extended network will compel enterprise architects to help business leaders identify and respond to new business patterns accordingly.

The enterprise itself is not static, so you can't architect statically. In an environment where business relationships are constantly changing in response to changes in the environment, the enterprise is in a constant state of evolution. Nokia (a Finnish phone manufacturer) was once a water mill, Radio Shack (a U.S. electronics retail company) was a leather goods company, Zebco (once, the Zero Hour Bomb Company) became the top fishing gear supplier in the U.S. Change does happen.

Those who have faithfully followed the analogy of "EA as city planning" will be challenged to overcome the habit of planning to build the known and shift their thinking into the concept of planning to build the unknown. The business will continue to change as it evaluates and adapts patterns of risk and opportunity. This will cause those running the organization to set new direction and guidance (e.g., change strategy), requiring a change in operations (e.g., new processes, people skills, investments, applications, information and technology) to realize the desired change.

In the 1990s, Samsung set an unyielding vision of becoming the top carmaker over a 10-year period. The result was stubborn overinvestment until, shortly after its first plant was opened in 1998, the company was forced to sell the division due to the Asian financial crisis in the same year. In 1803, the U.K. government created a civil service job requiring a man to stand on the cliffs of Dover with a spyglass and ring a bell if he saw Napoleon coming. The job existed until 1945. No one tracked the environmental pattern that should have resulted in appropriate change.

The current economic downturn is just another example of volatility. Environmental volatility preceded the current recession, and will remain after the economy recovers. Volatility produces opportunities to create value as well as threats to existing businesses. EA leaders can use Pattern-Based Strategy to seize the upside of volatility, rather than becoming victims of it.

Enterprise architects must now scan for environmental volatility, continuously adapting internal and external business patterns in response to opportunity and threat signals. The speed at which EA changes must match the speed at which the business is changing.

The natural tendency of technologists is to want to control the outcome and "know" the answer. As with many of the concepts in this note, this one will also challenge the reader to wonder, "Why should I do this, if I have no control?" In an enterprise environment that is increasingly sensitive to patterns of change, enterprise architects will need to go beyond what Steven Covey has described as their "spheres of influence" and look to the periphery to describe:

• What should be controlled and what should not be controlled
• Opportunities that exist outside of the current sphere of control
• Threats that exist outside of the current sphere of control
• The conditions and variables that indicate the likelihood that change is a necessity, proactively or reactively

It's important to recognize that control and standardization are transitory and not always in the best interest of the organization, and the effects are not always monitored so that the organization can sense and respond to changes. In the case of a financial services company in Europe, strict internal security controls on outbound e-mail resulted in a drop in outbound e-mail traffic and an increase in the use of private online mail accounts. Due to limited visibility beyond the immediate sphere of influence, the effects of the imposed controls were not discovered until almost a year after the controls were introduced.

Architects need to stop thinking about EA in terms of what they can control and what standards they can set. Rather, they must think in terms of what relationships they need to enable and how they can influence them.

Pattern-Based Strategy basically boils down to this: A business allocates resources (time, money and people) across four distinct, but interdependent, investment categories. In "Balance Investment in Four Categories to Support Pattern-Based Strategy," we define these as:

• Defined — Predictable components of the business
• Exceptions — Changes to defined routines that need to be dealt with
• Creative — A collaborative discovery process to identify new patterns that may be opportunities or threats
• Collective — Constantly monitoring the people, processes and information that you can't control and seeking patterns that may have a positive or negative impact on your business (e.g., groups that congregate in Twitter or Facebook)

An organization that exhibits Pattern-Based Strategy will detect changes in the business environment by actively seeking patterns that may indicate an exception, modeling the impact of the patterns and adapting business strategy and operations to the new patterns. This means that the architect can no longer afford to think solely in terms of business processes, business functions, information flows and technology capabilities, but rather needs to be able to express the strategy of the enterprise in terms of the required resource allocation across these dimensions and the implications to changes in those resource allocations. For example, a significant increase in resource allocation to the creative category will have implications on information flow and information sharing, the technology capabilities required, and the external connection points that the architecture will need to accommodate.

Pattern-Based Strategy will require new skills for enterprise architects. Many of these skills are required to eliminate silos and linear thinking in the organization. Although this has always been important, it is now imperative to address the new requirements of the networked enterprise. Acceptance of predetermined patterns or expected sequences will no longer be adequate. Nonlinear thinking is critical for architecting complex, networked organizations that can quickly see a pattern and effectively adapt the organization to changes.

The creation and operation of cross-functional teams will be critical to the organization's ability to deal effectively with the degree and complexity of change. These teams are necessary for understanding and addressing the requirements of a networked enterprise. The formation of high-performing teams requires a profound understanding of the "people aspect" of the enterprise from a functional and organizational perspective. Enterprise architects must finally recognize the importance of this aspect and embrace leadership and facilitation skills.

A wide variety of analytical skills will be required to enable organizations to seek, model and adapt to change. As complexity and the degree of change increase, scenario planning techniques combined with systems thinking will be vital for enabling the organization to understand its strategic direction in a rapidly changing environment. For determining appropriate scenarios and identifying the important factors that might impact those scenarios (systems thinking), additional analysis techniques will be increasingly important. The following techniques can be used as a basis for envisioning multiple scenarios:

• Chaos theory analyzes how dynamic systems, such as organizations, evolve over time, based on changes in initial conditions. At times, this evolution appears to be random or chaotic. However, if closely analyzed, the cause of changes and subsequent behavior can be identified.
• Game theory is vital for understanding how markets and organizations are sensitive to the choices of partners, collaborators, clients, regulators and others. Successful organizations constantly review the choices of others to sense a change in business patterns and to respond promptly.
• System theory, multicompartment modeling and compartmental analysis help to understand organizations as complex ecosystems with activities that regularly interrelate. By decomposing the complex activities of organizations, you can gain a better understanding of the aspects that may impact changes to business patterns.
• System dynamics illustrate the behavior of complex organizations over time as circular, interlocking and sometimes time-delayed relationships.
• Value network analysis is a methodology for understanding, using, visualizing, and optimizing internal and external value networks as well as complex economic ecosystems. The methods include visualizing sets of relationships from a dynamic whole-system perspective.

Enterprise architects must now recognize that they need to perfect some new skills to enable them to effectively contribute to the increasingly complex organizations in which they find themselves. Failure to recognize this important aspect will hinder EA program success and enterprise architects in this new business environment.

In early 2008, a large manufacturing company placed strict controls on spending to preserve cash, in the belief that demand for its products would shrink. In July of the same year, the CFO received a purchase order for a factory chimney. Flying to Spain to determine the purpose of the purchase order, he was surprised to learn that the local management had "gamed the system" and built a factory by issuing purchase orders within their spending limits. The only component that they could not fit within their existing limits was the chimney.

Local management did this because they detected patterns of new business demand when the global management did not. They were correct and the global strategy was wrong. The front line was making strategic decisions based on information available at the periphery of the business, beyond the visibility of senior management.

Enterprise architects will need to capture a view of the ecosystem, or extended enterprise, within which the organization operates. Providing visibility to what's inside and what's outside the environment, communicating potential impacts (positive and negative), and projecting impact scenarios for taking advantage of or resisting change will be part of the EA team's new remit to support Pattern-Based Strategy in the enterprise.

Strong anchor models that depict the network will be needed; approaches such as those advocated by authorities such as Clayton Christensen, Verna Allee, Charles B. Stabell, Øystein D. Fjeldstad, Richard Normann and Rafael Ramírez will be common. Environmental scanning, transparency to what's occurring internally and externally and variance monitoring to identify triggers of inclusion and exclusion in response to patterns of opportunities or threats will extend the role of EA team beyond the borders of the IT organization — and beyond the "four walls" of the enterprise.

"Introducing Pattern-Based Strategy"

"Gartner Clarifies the Definition of the Term 'Enterprise Architecture'"

"Top EA Challenges Are People and Business Issues"

"Using 'EA Lite' to Architect for Innovation: Principles and Best Practices"