As Enterprise Architects most of us have an ever growing side job of being a futurist and/or a trendspotter. Many reasons for this but the primary reason is the level of digital transformation that is happening is having a material impact on our businesses. For many business leaders, they will want Enterprise Architects to be their "early warning system" to understand both opportunities and threats to their business.
To operationalize this for Enterprise Architects, a practice of "Trendsetting" has emerged to create repeatable processes, role definition, core deliverables, and the expected outcomes. Trendspotting is about detecting leading indicators (or sometimes called signals) with plausible future scenarios.
The purpose of trendspotting is to answer three of the most crucial questions forEnterprise Architects:
How can I tell which of today’s technology trends will be disruptive?
How do I decide which trend to react to and which to ignore?
How do I determine the right moment to respond to a trend for my organization to balance the risk against the potential gain in business value?
Some skeptics have been known to perceive trendspotting as a bit of a guessing game. If done right, it’s actually provides an enormous amount of value.
From an approach perspective, it comes down to three major steps.
Scan the Market. Taking a proactive assessment of the market dynamics, investments by venture capital firms, long-range research projects, think tanks, start-up community, and established vendors' product roadmaps. It also considers the level of market interest and hype.
Select & Analyze Relevant Technologies. Structure raw analysis into a form that allows for synthesis of trends and emerging technologies. Through the analysis consider a full PESTLE analysis that assesses the potential impact your organization. This should also include social / social economic factors as technology always has an affect on consumers, employees and customers.
Recommend High Impact Technologies. Once the first two steps are completed it's about understanding how these trends affect the organization, what the response should be, along with when and what investments need to be made. For each organization it can be very different. It boils down to what the organization is trying to achieve in terms of its business model and strategy. Organizations with a high-risk approach might want to invest in emerging trends, while more conservative enterprises will wait for a trend to mature first.
Enterprise Architects that are ideal for trendsetting share some of these characteristics and skills:
Inquisitive
Innovative
Unbiased
Growth Mindset
Collaborative
Methodical
Business Oriented
Creative
Storyteller
In Conclusion
If your EA practice masters trendspotting, you will be able to offer your organization a distinct competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Remember, some of the biggest impacts can come from disruptions inside AND outside our your industry, Take a fresh look at other industry business models and solutions to identify what obstacles and opportunities can be in your future.
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