In digital transformation, complexity is the problem. We can manage complicated environments, but sometimes feel overwhelmed when faced with a complex problem.

The increasing complexity of the business environment is a strong necessity for enterprise architecture management. It refers to both the technical and organisational architecture. Rapid changes in technology and rapidly changing customer expectations result in constant pressure to adapt the enterprise architecture and prepare organisations for a frequent and successful change. I am constantly looking at simple ways to understand, model, and design change.

A good starting point is to understand what the business is trying to achieve. There are many techniques and instruments to detect and describe how an organisation creates, delivers, and captures value.

I have no intention of reinventing the wheel or luring clients into an ivory tower. I use these methods to expand the value proposition for my clients in two directions:

Evaluating what the business is doing: I derive business capabilities at different levels, from high-level abstraction to underlying business processes to technologies used to support the activities required to deliver a capability.

Evaluating how business objectives must be implemented: I derive architecture principles and guidelines that lead us in the right direction when implementing business functions. They consist of non-functional requirements, technical capabilities, design rules etc.

It's the simple power of good methodologies that helps to untangle complexity and encourages our clients to ask questions they didn't think of before.

Embracing complexity is a journey where I discover new possibilities with each of my clients. Very often my job is to stop clients from focusing on one particular node that seems to be the main solution (a technology, a system, a process, a hierarchical decision etc.). The more we step back, embrace complexity, the better chance we have of finding simple answers, and it's often different than the simple answer that we started with. We're discovering that simplicity often lies on the other side of complexity. So, for any problem, the more you can zoom out and embrace complexity, the better chance you have of zooming in on the simple details that matter most.