Dive Brief:
- Enterprises are leaning on IT architectural expertise to fight a rising tide of technical debt and vendor sprawl, according to Forrester. The number of organizations with enterprise architecture units grew by five percentage points from 2022 to 2023, the analysts firm found.
- Nearly half of organizations said they had an enterprise architecture unit in 2023, according to Forrester’s survey of 559 IT professionals. Large enterprises led the pack with 55% reporting an enterprise architecture unit, compared to 47% the prior year.
- Enterprise architecture temporarily went out of fashion as organizations adopted Agile, according to Charles Betz, Forrester VP and research director. But unacceptable levels of tech debt are driving a shift in the other direction. “Enterprise architecture is coming out of the penalty box,” Betz said. “Companies are adding architect titles and organizational units.”
Dive Insight:
Large companies saddled with vast IT estates spread across teams, functions and geographies are hit hardest by architectural deficiencies. They also have been the fastest to return to enterprise architecture, an IT organization framework.
Seven in 10 enterprises sought out technologists with enterprise architecture training last year, compared to under two-thirds in 2022, the survey found. Meanwhile, the segment of small and midsize companies offering IT architecture positions declined slightly year over year, down to just over half in 2023.
A lack of designated architects doesn’t necessarily mean an organization has forgone the function, according to Betz.
“If you insist that you hate architects, then you're probably going to have some smart people who have reinvented enterprise architecture under a different name,” Betz said. “The other option is to continue enjoying the pain.”
IT management practices evolve in step with technology trends. Broad adoption of cloud’s distributed compute capabilities fueled decentralized Agile processes, freeing businesses from the stern hand of enterprise architecture overlords.
But the shift away from waterfall’s top-down order triggered new headaches. In addition to technical debt, CIOs grapple with a proliferation of costly code rewrites, hard-to-protect attack surfaces and incompatible software solutions, according to Forrester.
Agile is only responsible for some of the pain, Betz said. Most tech debt has deeper roots.
“Once we got off the mainframe and into the distributed world, you had a lot of tech vendors competing for customers,” Betz said. “You wound up with multiple flavors of storage, middleware, core infrastructure and sprawl that reached a crisis point.”
Waterfall project teams deserve a share of the blame for the buildup and enterprise architecture units were often complicit in the shift away from structured governance, said Betz.
“What made people mad about architecture was the 50-page checklist,” he said. “But those checklists arose because there were battle scars from people getting it wrong, which can cost a large enterprise millions over time.”
Enterprise architecture was often too high-handed and bureaucratic to support rapid innovation, Betz said. But sound architectural principles and Agile processes aren’t mutually exclusive: The two can live peaceably through platform-based IT strategy.
“In a properly executed platform strategy, major architecture and security checks have happened,” Betz wrote in an April Forrester blog post. “That 50-item checklist diminishes by 90%.”
The path forward is a two-way street, with stakeholders accepting a level of standardization and architects not standing in the way of progress.
“When enterprise architecture angers a lot of people, its value gets questioned and it gets disbanded," Betz said. “Then there's a moment of truth, like a major breach, and there’s a realization that maybe we shouldn't have gotten rid of the architects.”
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the survey consulted 559 respondents.
