Rethinking Architecture for Digital Business

Organizations world-wide are in the midst of an existential crisis, this arises from the fact that they are being challenged by organizations from another industry or start-ups and not from their regular competition. These challenges arise from the fact that competition is able to innovate and leverage new technologies [like social, mobile, cloud, big-data, smart devices etc.,] to create new categories of products and services that disrupt a tradition. This disruption due to new digital technologies is what is being termed as ‘digital disruption’ and the emerging new business is called ‘Digital Business’.

Recent trends show that organizations that accept the challenge and adopt their products and services can survive or even thrive. For a business to transform into digital business, they not only have to make incremental changes to their current systems and processes but also adopt dramatically new technologies and create new processes. This essentially requires us to re-think architectures; and we believe this requires a two-prong approach

Adopt technologies and solutions that will satisfy the ‘new’ expectations of users, we call this approach ‘digital first’, and
Adopting incremental innovation to existing technologies and systems that enables the digital first architectures is what we call as ‘foundation architectures’.

Rethinking Architecture for Digital Business

Traits of Digital First Architectures

Users first – this involves keeping user’s needs and expectations as the highest priority while designing systems, this is also known as ‘design thinking’. Users today expect systems to be accessible on any device, interact with same application across multiple screens (or wearables), interact with them through touch, audio and very soon by looking at parts of the screen.
Context-Aware – a key element of delivering engaging user experience is by ensuring that the application is aware of the user’s frequent/pending tasks, likes/dislikes, location, presence etc. This information is not often available within the application context, and will have to be derived from external sources (with-in or outside the enterprises) and may involve analyzing massive large amounts of information, and sometimes in real-time.
Apps Thinking – ‘Apps thinking’ is about delivering applications that are single mindedly focused on users and getting things done for them quickly.
Elastic & Scale – Planning for scale that is not predictable is fundamental to digital business. Elastic architectures need to intelligently scale and address availability concerns
Connected – users are connected, devices used by users are connected, partners and businesses are connected. Digital architectures have to be connected always and integration (real-time) cannot be an afterthought

Foundation Thinking

Delivering digital first architectures requires robust and reliable foundation architectures. This foundation architecture should adopt incremental innovation happening in areas of light weight integration through APIs, in-memory architectures, high-volume data processing, intelligent and adaptive business processes.

Successful digital businesses will adopt Digital First Architectures and will back them by strong Foundational Architectures.

About the Author

Hari Kishan Burle is responsible for Architecture Services of Business Application Services business at Wipro Limited. Hari has been with Wipro for over 20 years in various technical and leadership roles. He incubated the Software as a Service/Cloud practice in 2007, successfully ran the middleware and mobility practice from 2009 to 2011, after which he took on the role of head of architecture services. Hari has a special interest in emerging technologies and their impact on enterprise systems.

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