Having a strong enterprise architecture at your disposal can have tons of business benefits. It can not only improve your business productivity by optimizing product and service delivery but can also improve risk management and improve employee satisfaction, which leads to better employee retention.
Enterprises can understand the end to end data flow, which would help them with optimization. Moreover, it can also enable you to align business and IT goals as well as help you identify new opportunities that you might not have tapped into yet. This will make it extremely easy to translate them into real-world applications.
Despite these advantages, most businesses look at enterprise architecture as a move to forcefully implement technologies on business users. Another reason why most businesses don’t invest resources in developing an enterprise architecture is that they think of it as a system analysis report that no one will ever use.
Even if you decide on creating your own enterprise architecture for your business, you need to define the right enterprise architecture roles. This would not be possible without understanding the pros and cons of each enterprise architecture and its use cases for it.
If you are still on the fence about whether you should develop your own enterprise architecture or not or are interested in knowing how your enterprise architecture will impact different functional units of your enterprise then this article is for you.
In this article, you will learn about four key business functions that your enterprise architecture can make or break.
4 Business Functions Enterprise Architecture Can Influence
Here are four key business functions that your enterprise architecture can impact.
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Supply Chain
One of the worst affected departments of your enterprise might be the supply chain. If that is the case, you are not alone. Most enterprises are dealing with similar issues. With global pandemic, war and other issues disrupting the supply chain across the globe, both businesses and countries are struggling to shop products for their customers.
Enterprise architecture can be a lifesaver in such a situation. In fact, it has already helped many car manufacturers understand how they can ship products without components that are currently not available. Radicle Science, an online service provider that evaluates the effectiveness of health and fitness products used enterprise architecture to keep an eye on data formats and application programming interfaces used by data suppliers. This allowed them to see the changes early and save their business from the negative impact of supply chain disruptions.
Yes, these businesses have to integrate data from APIs that their logistics suppliers use for it to work but the effort is well worth it as it saved them from supply chain disaster. That is why we are seeing more and more businesses buying enterprise architecture along with analytics, products and supply chain experts especially if they are not planning to create their own version of it in house.
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Human Resource
With great resignation and remote work encouraging employees to either quit their jobs or demand more flexibility in working hours, businesses are finding it difficult to retain their top talents. Shortage of talented individuals and focus on improving the employee experience complicates matters even more.
Enterprise architecture can not only help your business create better products and services but can also help you deliver a more immersive and engaging employee experience to your employees. Businesses that already have an enterprise architecture are tweaking their enterprise architecture strategy to accommodate for remote or hybrid work challenges. The best part about having an enterprise architecture is that it adds scalability and security to your employee’s remote work experience.
This means that businesses don’t have to worry about security issues affecting their remote workforce. More importantly, they can easily scale remote work and make their entire teamwork from home. This gives businesses the peace of mind and flexibility they need to thrive in today’s turbulent and rapidly evolving business environment.
Additionally, enterprise architecture can simplify and accelerate the onboarding experience for new employees. It achieves this by understanding which applications new employees need access to and making it easily accessible for them. Employee-focused enterprise architecture can help businesses better understand how different decisions such as downsizing, automation and outsourcing can negatively impact other employees.
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Information Technology
As apparent from the aforementioned Radicle Science example, enterprise architecture can play a crucial role in improving the effectiveness of the IT department as well. Radicle Science spent time understanding how data should be stored and in which formats. More importantly, they also improved the process of how their critical data is collected, organized and stored on their Chicago dedicated server, setting their organization up for success.
They also used actionable insights from huge data sets informing them about which type of database they should use to store their critical business data. As their APIs have to connect with more data sources, it is important for them to understand how data is exchanged between these points. Enterprise architecture has best dedicated server also helped them with that too.
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Service and Product Delivery
Small and fast-moving companies have to continuously introduce new and innovative products and services with server in amsterdam to keep their customers engaged. As a result, they could not invest heavily in improving the technology infrastructure used for internal use. We are seeing this trend change as more and more small companies are allocating resources to technologies like cloud computing and data analytics This could not only allow them to reduce costs but make the data-centric decisions. It allows them to divert resources to areas that can generate the most revenue for the business.
Enterprise architecture can help businesses deliver a more cohesive user experience across the board by merging both customer-facing units as well as back offices. When customers get a consistent experience throughout their buyer journey, it will automatically boost their customer satisfaction levels. They will not only recommend your products and services to others but will also make recurring purchases.
How does your enterprise architecture impact different departments in your organization? Share it with us in the comments section below.
