Blog

November 12, 2024

Why Enterprise Architecture Management May Be Better Positioned as a Digital Twin for the Enterprises #2

The Modern EAM Application

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A blog series by Brian Halkjær, Partner at Konfident, and Thomas Teglund, Lead Enterprise Architect at Securitas.

In the previous installment of this blog series, we explored how to better highlight the often-overlooked value of Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM). We introduced the analogy of EAM as a digital twin of the enterprise, aiming to simplify the complexity surrounding the value of EA and make it more accessible to decision-makers.

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How Data-Driven EAM Applications Align with the Digital Twin Concept

We believe the analogy to be relevant to modern EAM applications, such as LeanIX (which we will be basing our conclusions on) and others.

A modern EAM application is designed to capture, maintain, and analyze the bigger building blocks of an enterprise, in a way that mirrors the digital twin approach. By creating a comprehensive, data-driven model of the enterprise landscape, a modern EAM application offers an "as-is" state while supporting scenario planning for future changes and forecasting of future states.

The application doesn’t just represent the structure of an organization's technology and business landscapes; it reflects their dynamic relationships and dependencies. The modern EAM application enables the enterprise to simulate changes to the IT landscape, showing how those changes would impact the organization.

For example, if a company is considering moving certain applications to the cloud, LeanIX can help visualize the impact of that shift on the broader IT landscape, helping stakeholders make better informed decisions. While this focus is different, and we are orchestrating the bigger building blocks of an organization in LeanIX, this is still very similar to how digital twins allow engineers to test modifications before making changes to the product in the physical world.

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The Digital Twin model adapted to Leanix. In the left box is the real space of the enterprise with all elements of a business from goals to applications etc. This box provides data to the virtual space (digital twin), which in this case is LeanIX's metamodel v4, with all factsheet types. The virtual space sends information back into the real space for data-driven decisions. — *Adaptation of The Digital Twin Concept Model (Grieves, 2015)*

This kind of dynamic, data-driven approach is what makes a modern EAM application like LeanIX more than just a repository of information. It’s an active, evolving representation of your enterprise, or in other words, a digital twin for your business- and IT landscape. By integrating accurate data from your business into LeanIX, the application can visualize the impact of various business transformation or cost-reduction scenarios on your IT landscape. This data-driven approach also enables proactive risk mitigation. For example, LeanIX allows you to perform scenario planning for dependencies on outdated software or assess the risks tied to relying on specific applications before making changes to your organization’s reality.

By adopting this digital twin perspective or parts hereof, EAM becomes more accessible and understandable for business stakeholders, demonstrating that it’s not just an IT-centric exercise but a critical enabler for aligning IT with business strategy. Furthermore, having business and technology stakeholders navigate and explore opportunities and scenarios together, based on a digital twin of the enterprise, fosters a holistic perspective on how to tackle challenges and opportunities. These are the conversations where it becomes all too visible to everyone how seemingly local decisions have a tendency to trickle wide and far due to hidden dependencies.

Naturally, there are obvious differences between the industrial digital twins we are drawing parallels to and EAM applications. The former receive an endless stream of data, from IoT devices etc., about all the fine details of things. They are fast-moving with a high level of granularity/detail. Working with the higher level of abstraction in EAM applications, we are concerned with a representation which is more slow-moving and has a lower level of granularity. Another key difference is that the “original” digital twin is largely concerned with physically observable concepts, in an EAM application, we are primarily concerned with more abstract concepts, which are not visible to the naked eye. You cannot easily observe a business capability, a microservice, or a modernized technology infrastructure.

Thus, we recognize that it is not a Digital Twin for Organizations (DTO) by the formal definition of such software models. Still, it's tempting to coin the term "Digital Twin of Enterprises (DTE)" when bringing the LeanIX metamodel at play in an enterprise. For now, though, we withstand from using this term officially, as it could invite unproductive discussions, our focus remains on making EAM a more appealing concept.

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Up Next in the Blog Series

In the next article in this blog series, we will explore the essential prerequisites for achieving success with data-driven Enterprise Architecture. We will highlight the critical importance of data quality and data quality assurance in effectively building a digital twin of the enterprise.

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