As digital technologies and AI evolve, heads of enterprise architecture face new challenges. To maintain relevance, they must redesign operating models, modernize technology portfolios, and enhance skills.
This research offers strategic insights to address 2025 challenges, solidify strategic plans, and improve the relevance and success of enterprise architecture programs in an increasingly digital world.
New heads of enterprise architecture face complex challenges - functional leadership, technology enablement, value delivery, and aligning business and IT strategy. Gartner Executive FastStart empowers you to overcome these hurdles and accelerate your impact, whether you’re new to the role or transitioning within your organization. Ready to drive value? Start your journey today.
As the focus of the enterprise architecture shifts from the IT organization to the business, the types of deliverables need to change. Heads of EA will now require new models and analyses, practices and competencies to understand, support and add value for their business stakeholders.
Organizations are evolving their operating models to enhance delivery speed and agility, while supporting local autonomy. These changes challenge existing business processes and governance structures. Utilize this roadmap to guide heads of Enterprise Architecture in establishing functional models for long-term success in a postdigital, product-centric environment.
The pace of digital business transformation is rapidly increasing as organizations strive to provide services and products in a challenging operating environment. Leverage this roadmap to modernize your enterprise architecture business strategy by creating effective practices and disseminating deliverables that offer guidance for implementing digital transformation.
Responsibility for digital delivery has been shifting from the IT organization into the business, driven by the business’s desire for more control and ownership. This risks organizations becoming fragmented and inefficient. Make enterprise architecture an essential part of democratization.
Organizations without a digital foundations strategy struggle to realize the value of modern digital solutions and tools. Leverage this research to identify opportunities for digital foundation transformation.
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Many EA leaders wrongly assume that their organizations will automatically progress on their maturity journey by solely completing prescribed activities and tasks, hoping to make rapid progress. Ticking the box on specific activities might seem necessary to grow and develop, but advancing EA capability and maturity is ultimately assessed through the eyes of the stakeholders served. By not focusing on the value perceived by their stakeholders, this will inevitably create a misalignment between the work EA does and the value stakeholders desire.
Whether those stakeholders sit in IT, business or elsewhere, EA leaders must understand what success looks like to stakeholders and then assess the roadmap to EA maturity from that point of view. Reassessing and rethinking EA’s value proposition, as maturity develops/grows and stakeholders broaden, is critical to establishing functional relationships.
Rushing to hire externally to establish an EA team is not always the answer and can do more harm than good. A hiring plan without a clear EA value proposition and defined EA services mapped to targeted business outcomes can undermine stakeholder buy-in and business impact.
EA leaders standing up a new EA discipline or renewing EA efforts must initially build a minimum viable team via quiet hiring of internal resources, and then grow the team, with external hiring or consultancy support, based on evolving business needs.
Many Gartner clients have EA teams with limited capacity or that lack specialized skills, or they have no formal EA team at all. For enterprise architects looking to grow capacity within their EA teams, finding and retaining EA talent is also a challenge.
To address this, EA leaders can look externally for resources to help deliver targeted outcomes, which EA-as-a-service providers can fulfill. Despite interest from clients, we see very few examples of this. While finding the right EA-as-a-service provider is a challenge in itself, the main reasons for limited adoption are the time and effort plus the vendor management practices needed to make EA as a service succeed.
Enterprise architecture (EA) is a discipline for proactively and holistically leading enterprise responses to disruptive forces by identifying and analyzing the execution of change toward desired business vision and outcomes. EA delivers value by presenting business and IT leaders with signature-ready recommendations for adjusting policies and projects to achieve targeted business outcomes that capitalize on relevant business disruptions.
Gartner is an objective resource for more than 15,000 enterprises in ~90 countries and territories.
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