I recently participated in three Gartner conferences where the possible disruption, in my opinion, to their business model from Generative Artificial Intelligence was only barely peeking in. It will soon inevitably revolutionize the business of providing research findings on the rapidly changing business and IT landscape, something I will call the EA Landscape. I have created a graphic to give a sense of the complex ecosystem of this landscape and why AI must play a dominant role in understanding and making recommendations for change regarding it:

In many ways and for many years, organizations who have invested in Enterprise Architecture programs have most often failed completely in this discipline or were only chipping away at its potential. While EA is intended to help understand and manage complexity, it is also much more complex itself than most organizations have realized. For example, the expectation for investing in EA is that one will have a much better understanding of the EA Landscape. However, the concept for such a landscape has been supremely simplified to the degree that it has been generally doomed from the start in the quest for providing compelling, comprehensive, and cohesive information for better decisions faster on even the most complex transformations.

For example, the leading EA framework in the world, TOGAF, while providing the most useful platform for understanding EA and the many building blocks needed to establish and sustain and EA practice, oversimplifies the notion of an EA Landscape. The graphic above, which I created, goes well beyond just the Strategic, Segment, and Capability “increments” levels of the landscape that TOGAF describes. All these dimensions are, however, essential to consider for any significant change initiative that would use TOGAF’s famous Architecture Development Method (ADM).

It includes what I call Implementation Architecture, Living Architecture (essentially the never stable production environment), and Disruptive Architecture perspectives which must be continuously monitored with Active Architecture Governance. Why add these? Because EA’s core contribution is to help analyze the EA Landscape for any needed changes, as well as to guide change for optimum results and controlled risks. Without a complete picture for its “City Planning” mission, EA is just dabbling in the advice game with inexcusably incomplete information and analysis, even with the best EA tools to date, prior to the arrival of Generative AI. But now it is “Showtime”!

Generative AI can provide world-class research and recommendations in well-formatted reports…in seconds – given well-informed and optimally crafted prompts (possibly linked to the inclusion of large amounts of additionally information for the AI bot to consider).

For example, AI, if fed TOGAF and all the learning objectives in the TOGAF Enterprise Architecture certification program, it can tweak the list as questions and even provide answers. Even for the more complex learning objectives related to the Practitioner Level of learning and certification, AI can generate myriad new scenarios cutting across numerous business and government sectors and do so in seconds! It can even create questions for each scenario created!

We are truly at the beginning of a radical transformation that will make comprehensive research about even the most complex transformations, some we haven’t even thought of yet, available to everyone for nominal costs. That noted, experts, such as those at Gartner and other major firms leading in EA consulting, will be best positioned to interact with AI to get the best and most useful results.

EA Principals is working urgently to incorporate AI in all its training, consulting, mentoring and product offerings this year. We are proud to be “bleeding edge” in the use of the incredible new technology.

Authored by Dr. Steve Else, Chief Architect & Principal Instructor