How Vanguard Enterprise Arch 299268

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G00299268
How Vanguard Enterprise Architects Lead

Technology Innovation
Published: 24 March 2016
Analyst(s): Brian Burke, Betsy Burton, Mike J. Walker
As the rate of technological innovation increases, EA leaders are challenged

to evaluate the impacts of these disruptions. By using a structured
approach to evaluate disruptive technologies, EA leaders can increase the
opportunities and reduce the risks of technology innovation.
Key Challenges
Enterprise architects are challenged to:
■ Proactively ideate disruptive-technology trends, including evaluating their capabilities, use

cases and opportunities.
■ Rationalize and anchor innovation opportunities to business outcomes and strategic direction.
■ Evaluate the opportunities and risks of a disruptive technology, based on its impact on human,
business and technology experiences.
■ Catalyze business value from disruptive-technology opportunities by determining the impacts
and creating transformation roadmaps.
Recommendations
■ Define and use an ideation process to quickly identify disruptive technologies that are most
likely to have the greatest impact on your industry, geography and organization. Use market
research tools, such as Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends, Top Predictions,
Emerging Technology Hype Cycles and Cool Vendor reports, to proactively scan for disruptive
technologies and trends.
■ To increase your strategic impact and value, position evaluations and recommendations on
disruptive technologies based on the clear and direct impact on business outcomes, even if it
requires a secondary or derivative impact.
■ Look for areas where disruptive technology may cause you to rethink your current strategic
trajectory and future state, and make adjustments, augmentations and transformation changes
accordingly. Recognize that these changes would then have an impact on the entire cycle,

investment and deliverables during the evaluation of a disruptive technology (such as impact,
outcomes, risks and business models).
Table of Contents
Strategic Planning Assumptions............................................................................................................. 3

Introduction............................................................................................................................................ 3
Analysis.................................................................................................................................................. 7
Phase 0: Proactively Ideate Disruptive-Technology Trends, Including Evaluating Their Capabilities,
Use Cases and Opportunities........................................................................................................... 7
Actionable Deliverable: Exploratory Technology Proposals.......................................................... 9
Diagnostic Deliverable: Technology Analysis................................................................................9
Diagnostic Deliverable: Market Analysis.................................................................................... 10
Diagnostic Deliverable: Ideation Analysis...................................................................................11
Diagnostic Deliverable: Opportunity Identification...................................................................... 11
Phase 1: Rationalize and Anchor Innovation Opportunities to Business Outcomes and Strategic
Direction......................................................................................................................................... 12
Actionable Deliverable: Opportunity Proposals.......................................................................... 13
Diagnostic Deliverable: Business Scenario Analysis.................................................................. 13
Diagnostic Deliverable: Business Capability Impact Assessment............................................... 13
Diagnostic Deliverable: Opportunity Analysis.............................................................................13
Diagnostic Deliverable: Business Outcome Statements............................................................ 14
Phase 2: Evaluate the Opportunities and Risks of a Disruptive Technology, Based on Its Impact on
Human, Business and Technology Experiences.............................................................................. 14
Actionable Deliverable: Business Viability Proposals..................................................................16
Diagnostic Deliverable: Risk Profiling.........................................................................................16
Diagnostic Deliverable: Benefit Profiling.....................................................................................17
Diagnostic Deliverable: Readiness Assessment.........................................................................17
Phase 3: Catalyze Business Value From Disruptive-Technology Opportunities by Determining the
Impacts and Creating Transformation Roadmaps........................................................................... 18
Actionable Deliverable: Innovation Strategic Plan...................................................................... 19
Diagnostic Deliverable: Impact Appraisal...................................................................................19
Diagnostic Deliverable: Gaps and Opportunities........................................................................19
Diagnostic Deliverable: Roadmap............................................................................................. 19
Gartner Recommended Reading.......................................................................................................... 20
Page 2 of 22 Gartner, Inc. | G00299268

List of Figures
Figure 1. Leading the Enterprise Response to Disruptive Technologies................................................... 4

Figure 2. Ideation Funnel: Stage Gates in Disruptive-Technology Evaluations.......................................... 6
Figure 3. Phase 0 Ideation and Example Actionable, Diagnostic and Enabling Deliverables.....................8
Figure 4. Phase 1 Rationalization and Example Actionable, Diagnostic and Enabling Deliverables.........12
Figure 5. Phase 2 Evaluation and Example Actionable, Diagnostic and Enabling Deliverables............... 15
Figure 6. Phase 3 Transformation and Example Actionable, Diagnostic and Enabling Deliverables........ 18
Strategic Planning Assumptions

By 2018, 40% of EA teams will be distinguished as leaders by their primary focus on applying
disruptive technologies to drive business innovation.
By 2018, 40% of EA teams will be responsible for advancing the organization's digital business
strategy.
Introduction
Leading enterprise architects have a profound impact on their organizations' evaluation and
adoption of disruptive technologies and trends. We find EA practitioners have a significant influence
— that is, either "final decision maker" or "great deal of influence" on $1.1 trillion in worldwide
1
enterprise IT spend. When we look into these survey results in more detail, we find that 20% of EA
practitioners specifically have a final decision-making authority on purchases of disruptive
technology and IT management budget activities. In addition, they are "very involved" in integration
consulting services (64%) and business applications (52%). In fact, in Gartner research, enterprise
architects form the largest identified group of readers of Gartner's Hype Cycle for Emerging
2 3 4
Technologies, Gartner's Top Predictions and Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends reports.
The challenge that enterprise architects who are leading technology innovation face is having a
clear method for investigating a wide variety of disruptive trends and technologies. Turning research
into action requires that specific business outcomes are identified and actionable recommendations
are made for initiating specific pilot or prototype projects, that can later be extended to full
implementations. They must understand and be able to communicate the impact of these trends on
the market, their industry and, more importantly, on their organizations, and offer specific
5
recommendations for adopting new technologies (or not). However, many lack the leadership skills
and competencies required to identify and assess the new business models, potential use-case
scenarios, and opportunities and potential impacts on their business ecosystem and industry (see
"Digital Business Success Will Be Driven by Economic Architecture").
Gartner, Inc. | G00299268 Page 3 of 22

The disruptive-technology trend landscape is complex, and not all trends will have an equal
importance to every industry or enterprise. To be successful, vanguard enterprise architects (see
Note 1) must take a structured, yet flexible and iterative approach that enables them to quickly
explore what disruptive trends need investigation, analyze their impact on the enterprise and deliver
actionable recommendations that drive change (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Leading the Enterprise Response to Disruptive Technologies
Source: Gartner (March 2016)
In this research, we detail an approach for responding to the disruptive impact, based on best
6
practices we have seen to work with leading EA practitioners. This approach includes a process of
creating actionable deliverables across the four phases:
1. Ideate. An ideation process in which disruptive trends are identified and examined through a
structured method of identifying the major technology trends, understanding the capabilities of
these trends, and determining the specific use cases that are impacting people and businesses
at large. By identifying the opportunities to apply specific use cases, enterprise architects can
narrow down which use cases provide the organization with the highest potential for innovation
or optimization opportunities.

2. Rationalize. Deeper analysis of disruptive trends individually and in combination with the
context of specific business scenarios, and the affinity to business direction. During this phase,
the enterprise architect will interact with a deeper set of constituencies in the business and IT
group to develop the future-state models. The outcome of this phase will be a set of business
outcome statements and a decision to continue development in the business case phase, or to
shelve the idea for the future.
3. Evaluate. Having clarity on the business outcome and the high-level, future-state models,
enterprise architects are in a position to evaluate the business opportunity, costs, risks and
derivative impacts of undertaking a project to leverage the technology or trend. The result of
this phase is a set of opportunity viability proposals that can be presented to senior
management for a decision.
4. Transform. To transform the business, enterprise architects must collect and prioritize
innovation initiatives into a set of roadmaps that show the timing and interdependencies of the
projects that are proposed. Enterprise architects must create signature-ready actionable
deliverables that identify the new insights, decisions and recommendations that drive future
investments and adoption. Enterprise architects must also consider the impact on the
architecture, and accommodate the new technologies and trends into the future state.
Enterprise architects are also tasked with creation of an overall strategy document that outlines
the enterprise's approach to the disruptive trend or trends.
The evaluation of disruptive trends is iterative and re-entrant, depending on what opportunities,
risks and new business models are uncovered along the way. Moreover, each of the elements of the
process may continue in parallel. For example, ongoing tracking of a disruptive trend and its impact
on the market in general does not stop when a trend moves from a focus on ideation to
understanding, nor does the ongoing evaluation of the opportunities and risks end when a
recommendation to adopt a particular set of technologies is made.
Each step in the disruptive-trend process adds a level of research and analysis. At each phase, the
span of business and IT professionals who are part of the team exploring the trend will broaden.
Ultimately, when a trend has more fully matured and been deeply embraced in the organization, the
enterprise architect will transition much of the activity related to the trend to others and shift
attention to the next round of disruptive trends.
Given the large number of technology opportunities, one of the goals for the process is to eliminate
less-promising technologies and trends from further consideration. The process is stage-gate-
driven, so the action taken on any particular trend may result in an organization deciding to not
pursue a given technology, do more exploration and understanding, and/or take action to invest
with specific roadmaps and plans (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Ideation Funnel: Stage Gates in Disruptive-Technology Evaluations

It is important to note that the process outlined in this research represents a detailed set of
deliverables and analysis that may not be followed at the same level of detail in each step for every
organization or for every trend. However, the major steps themselves — ideation, rationalization of
business outcomes, evaluation of opportunities and risks, and creation of transformation roadmaps
— should be followed by everyone.
Analysis
Phase 0: Proactively Ideate Disruptive-Technology Trends, Including Evaluating Their
Capabilities, Use Cases and Opportunities
One of the initial challenges facing enterprise architects is sorting through the vast number of
disruptive-technology trends and supporting technologies that could impact their business. For
example, Gartner tracks more than 2,100 technologies, services and trends in 125 areas in its Hype
7
Cycle reports. EA practitioners who proactively leverage an ideation process that explores the
potential impact of disruptive-technology trends are able to decrease innovation cycle times by
quickly determining if a given technology warrants deeper analysis or not.
To explore the potential impact of disruptive technologies, and reduce the risk of investing too much
or too little in evaluations, leading EA practitioners facilitate an ideation process. The output of this
process is the creation of high-level actionable and diagnostic deliverables that help stakeholders
decide whether or not to make further investment by focusing on the capabilities, use cases and
opportunities identified for a given disruptive technology (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Phase 0 Ideation and Example Actionable, Diagnostic and Enabling Deliverables
A variety of sources can be used to identify disruptive trends and technologies. For example,
Gartner's Hype Cycles are a great source to identify potentially disruptive technologies and their
evolution (perceived value, adoption rate and time to mainstream adoption). However, Hype Cycles
do not identify every trend in technology that may be impactful for a specific organization, or what
these trends mean to its business. This requires EA practitioners to leverage market research —
including key research elements from Gartner, such as Hype Cycles, Top Predictions and Top 10
Strategic Technology Trends — as enabling deliverables that would inform or base the foundation
for diagnostic and actionable deliverables that are focused on the organization's specific potential
use cases.
Enterprise architects must also leverage industry-specific journals to understand the impact of
trends on their industries and to gain insights on how competitors are leveraging technologies. Also,
deployments in "near neighbor" industries can provide clues on how emerging technologies may be
leveraged in one's industry.

Actionable Deliverable: Exploratory Technology Proposals

The initial analysis steps are intended to provide a broad understanding of technology capabilities
and market impact, and to identify potential use cases for exploiting the technology within the
organization. This quick scan results in a subset of technologies that merit further investigation.
Exploratory technology proposals are presented to management approval for the investment of
additional resources in further exploration of a technology opportunity. Management must act on
these proposals to continue or discontinue investment in any identified technology opportunity.
Diagnostic Deliverable: Technology Analysis

Enterprise architects must first understand what a given technology or trend does, the service it
provides or enables, and how it is being applied.
A key challenge that EA practitioners face is that the capabilities that disruptive technologies offer
can be very ambiguous in their early stages. This changes over time when the disruptive technology
becomes clearer on its application to business problems and its overall market applicability. As a
result, EA practitioners must evaluate where a technology sits in the technology adoption life cycle
and adjust the evaluation criteria used accordingly (see "Understanding Gartner's Hype Cycles").
Enterprise architects must also pick apart the trend to determine how the capabilities of a disruptive
technology will evolve over the planning horizon, in regard to the market in general and the
organization in particular. Any number of factors may drive or inhibit the evolution of a technology:
■ Technological advances — As technology becomes more sophisticated, the ways that it can
be leveraged evolve. For example, Moore's Law predicted that the number of transistors that
can be incorporated into an integrated circuit will double every two years, and this has proven
to be relatively accurate. As today's technologies advance, new capabilities will drive new
opportunities to use those technologies in entirely new ways.
■ Market viability — As technologies improve and the volume of sales increases, the costs
almost invariably decline, enabling new opportunities to deploy those technologies in new ways.
As we have seen in the past, the declining cost of RFID tags has enabled many more
applications. In the future, the declining costs of sensors and connectivity will have the same
effect, driving down the costs to connect "things" to the Internet (Internet of Things).
■ Legal and regulatory changes — Amazon's delivery drones and Google's self-driving cars
have been making headlines recently. While there are limitations in the technologies, a far
greater impediment is the regulatory environment that does not permit commercial drone usage
in populated areas, or for a car to drive itself. Both cases are examples of how regulations must
evolve before technological advances can become commercially viable.
■ Social acceptance — One example is augmented reality. While the technology continues to
improve, the adoption rates remain low, primarily due to privacy concerns and fashion. Even
with the limited release, there was considerable public push-back, and even a new word
created — Google "Glasshole" — to describe the early adopters.

These are just some of the factors that enterprise architects may need to take into account when
evaluating the capabilities of disruptive technologies over the planning horizon. Based on this
analysis, EA practitioners create actionable, and supporting diagnostic and enabling deliverables,
which focus on identifying which opportunities should be explored further.
EA practitioners must also understand the nature and target for the disruption, as well as how
multiple disruptive trends feed on one another. One example is the trend to ambient user experience
where the idea of mobile switches from a mobile device to a mobile user surrounded by an ever-
changing landscape of devices, which will cause a radical shift in how services are delivered. In the
future, services will be delivered to users on the devices that are available to them at the time,
providing a continuous experience. This is due to the combinatorial effect of the explosion of
devices that surround us (which Gartner terms the "digital mesh"), and users' desire to have a
simple, rich and fluid experience over a range of devices. Any analysis of technology trends must
consider the combined impact over time. This is an often overlooked, but enormously critical, area
to examine.
Technology trends have impact individually, but often have a greater effect when a number of trends
and related technologies and initiatives are combined in new or unique ways, or when there is a
complementary combination of technology trends in related areas. The combinatorial effects may
create a new, higher-order technology trend, or result in a fertile environment for the emergence of
other targeted technologies in the future.
Diagnostic Deliverable: Market Analysis

Many technologies have a broad potential set of use cases. By focusing on how disruptive
technologies can actually be used, enterprise architects can evaluate how the disruptive technology
is being used today, and what potential future business scenarios are likely in the near term and
through to the end of the planning horizon.
To better understand this, EA practitioners should use predictive Gartner enabling deliverables, such
as Hype Cycles, Priority Matrices and Maverick reports, as a key input into understanding general
market considerations around availability, maturity and impact that the technology will have. As
technology advances and constraints are overcome, new use cases become possible for any given
technology.
For example, in the early 1980s, RFID technology was expensive, used only in high-value
applications. One of the first deployments of RFID technology was tracking vehicles carrying
nuclear material — the application needed to be high-value to incur the deployment costs. Of
course, as the cost of RFID technology dropped over the decades, its use has become
commonplace — such as hotel room keys, ski passes and laundry tracking.
Use cases are the key to understanding how technologies evolve. By focusing on how emerging
technologies are actually being used in the market, enterprise architects can evaluate how the
emerging technology is used today, and what use cases are likely in the near term and through to
the end of the planning horizon. A use-case radar chart can show examples of use cases and their
expected time frames (see "Toolkit: What Enterprise Architects Need to Know About IoT
Technologies" for an example).

Diagnostic Deliverable: Ideation Analysis

Enterprise architects should leverage a broad group of people to collect ideas on the potential
opportunities to leverage any given technology. This can be done with focus groups and workshops
or by crowdsourcing ideas. Some leading-edge organizations will have dedicated teams and
facilities focused on designing new and innovative solutions. General Electric is one such example,
with a design focus in its software center of excellence (COE).
Where these groups exist, the vanguard enterprise architect should partner with and tap into the
expertise of these groups, beginning in the ideation phase. Once those ideas are collected, EA
practitioners must analyze the results to identify which are the most promising ideas to evaluate
further. Sometimes, EA practitioners will score the ideas to help to identify which are the most
promising. In some cases, the crowd can be leveraged to identify the best ideas by voting them up,
and even to build out those ideas. Regardless of the approach that is used, EA practitioners must
shortlist the ideas collected through the ideation process.
Diagnostic Deliverable: Opportunity Identification

The first step is to evaluate what the potential use cases for an emerging technology are and how
they can be applied in the organization. Enterprise architects must scan their industry to understand
how competitors may be using emerging technologies. Also, deployments in near-neighbor
industries can provide clues on how emerging technologies may be leveraged in the industry. For
example, gamification was first broadly used by consumer brands to engage and motivate broad
audiences of potential customers. Seeing the opportunity to engage broad audiences, media
organizations began to leverage gamification to engage television audiences. More recently,
gamification has been largely targeted at employees in training and performance solutions.
One structured method for evaluating opportunities to leverage an emerging technology is to map
use cases against the business capabilities for the organization. Business capabilities describe
"what the organization does" and are the best place for matching emerging-technology use cases
to opportunities in the organization.
Actions:
■ Over the next six months, identify at least five to 10 disruptive technologies and trends that are
most likely to have the greatest impact on your industry, geography and organization. Document
the future-state business scenarios that are enabled or addressed by this trend.
■ Determine the strategic technology trends that have the greatest opportunity by identifying and
rating their capabilities and use cases, and creating an initial business capability mapping.
■ Use market research tools as enabling deliverables, such as Gartner Hype Cycles, Cool
Vendors, Top Technology Trends and Top Predictions, to proactively scan for disruptive
technologies and trends. Define an ideation process to quickly identify which are most likely to
have the greatest impact on your industry, geography and organization.
■ Time box your ideation process based on executive expectations and business demand, as well
as the complexity and potential impact of the disruptive technology.

■ Create a discussion forum for disruptive technologies to inform, engage and explore across the
organization. Leverage these discussions to explore potential utility scenarios and brainstorm
on new business models.
Phase 1: Rationalize and Anchor Innovation Opportunities to Business Outcomes

and Strategic Direction
Once a potential future business scenario for disruptive technologies has been identified in the
ideation process, the disruptive technology must gain management support for further exploration.
Enterprise architects must rationalize the opportunity with the target business outcomes, strategy
and future state. Regardless of the disruptive technology, EA practitioners who define a clear line of
sight, either direct or indirect, to measurable business outcomes dramatically increase their ability to
illustrate and demonstrate business value impact (see Figure 4).
Figure 4. Phase 1 Rationalization and Example Actionable, Diagnostic and Enabling Deliverables
It is important to keep in mind that, even though a disruptive technology may align to immediate
business desires or wants, it may not align to an organization's core strategies and future

capabilities. This is not intended to imply that organizations should or will focus only on disruptive
technologies that have a direct impact on business strategy. Clearly, organizations need to address
disruptive trends that may be more tactical or short-term. It is also important to recognize that major
industry trends that do not have a clear and immediate line of sight to the current business may
nevertheless have the potential for longer-term disruption that is unclear today — this is particularly
true with emerging technologies or trends that have a current impact on adjacent industries.
EA practitioners who help their business and IT leaders understand the costs and benefits of these
trade-off decisions enable their leaders to make more-effective investments, by understanding and
identifying the traceability to current business operations and future business capabilities.
Actionable Deliverable: Opportunity Proposals

This phase takes the identified technology opportunities and determines the potential business
outcomes that may be achieved by leveraging the technology. Opportunity proposals demonstrate
the technology opportunities that complement the business strategy and will achieve a significant
business outcome. This deliverable provides all information required for business and IT leadership
to continue to invest in the analysis.
Diagnostic Deliverable: Business Scenario Analysis

In most cases, enterprise architects will assess use cases to determine alignment to business
strategy, but occasionally, a disruptive technology may form the basis for an entirely new business
strategy. Most digital business strategies are built around disruptive technologies. It is important not
to limit strategic alignment to existing strategies, but rather, to take a broad perspective to
understand how disruptive technologies can form the basis for entirely new business strategies.
Diagnostic Deliverable: Business Capability Impact Assessment

Future-state models provide visual clues to the impact of emerging-technology strategies on the
business. Often, organizations will use business capability models to demonstrate the impact on the
future-state architecture, but enterprise architects can apply any modeling technique (for example,
application portfolio, information flows and business processes) that best describes and
communicates the impact of change on the business.
Diagnostic Deliverable: Opportunity Analysis

Opportunities must be analyzed to determine the degree to which a disruptive trend supports or
does not support the organization's business direction. A critical aspect of enterprise architects' role
is to help business and IT leaders determine if and how potential use-case scenarios for disruptive
trends are aligned to the business operations and strategy for the organization. A simple example of
an actionable deliverable is a map between potential use cases and business strategies. This
mapping may be based on several other diagnostic deliverables, such as a business outcome
statement or business capability mapping, and an enabling deliverable, such as a business strategy
statement. This type of actionable deliverable will provide a quick method for determining the
strategic fit for each use case.

Diagnostic Deliverable: Business Outcome Statements

Business outcome statements describe a specific business benefit that is measurable, achievable
within a specified time frame, and in support of the business strategy and objectives. These
statements provide clear direction and delineate the boundaries for the scope of work. The best
way to ensure that a business outcome is targeted to meet business needs is to map it to the
critical strategic questions that senior executives are asking.
Actions:
■ Create actionable deliverables that identify summarized business scenarios and selected
business outcomes. Prepare actionable recommendations to move to the next step in the
process, and be prepared to provide the diagnostic and enabling deliverables that support
these recommendations.
■ Do not focus just on the IT impact, regardless of the disruptive technology. The way to increase
your strategic impact and value is to provide evaluations and recommendations on disruptive
technologies that are based on the clear and direct impact on business outcomes, even if it
requires a secondary or derivative impact.
■ Do not ignore the IT impact. Not understanding the ramifications of the cost of new ancillary
tools or technologies to support the business solution, or the need to enhance skills or alter
organizational roles, can quickly lead to failure.
■ Use a structured approach when evaluating trends to strip away the hype, and determine what
the real opportunities are for your business in the future and today. Be willing to revisit current
strategic assumptions and plans, based on this evaluation.
■ Present business unit and IT leaders with a filtered set of prequalified business opportunities
that clearly map to business strategies.
Phase 2: Evaluate the Opportunities and Risks of a Disruptive Technology, Based on

Its Impact on Human, Business and Technology Experiences
Once business unit and IT leaders understand the alignment between the business vision and a
given disruptive technology, or have decided to revisit current strategic assumptions, EA
practitioners need to dig down into understanding, identifying and modeling opportunities and risks.
The opportunity and risk analysis, maturity assessments, and detailed business scenarios are
critical inputs (diagnostic deliverables) for informing and guiding actionable deliverables, including
investment recommendations and identification of business impact changes (people, process,
information and technology — see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Phase 2 Evaluation and Example Actionable, Diagnostic and Enabling Deliverables
During this phase of the evaluation, EA practitioners will build on the overall impact analysis done in
the rationalization phase and refine it for the organization's unique needs. They may find the need to
create a quick filter to evaluate a disruptive trend based on its impact on the current status quo of
human, business and technology experiences, and impact on current pain points. This could have a
huge impact on helping business and IT leaders understand the short-term and long-term business
impacts.
Another key deliverable is the definition of key constituencies of people (for example, consumers)
and target personas within those constituencies (for example, high-net-worth consumers). This
could enable understanding how the needs, wants, desires and pain points of these constituencies
relate to the impact of the disruptive trend.
It is critical for EA practitioners to evaluate the opportunity costs as disruptive-technology effects,

based on the impact on humans, business and technology, to determine the broad derivative
business impacts:

■ Human experience — Organizations should evaluate the impact of a disruptive trend on

individuals inside and outside the organization, including existing and potential customers,
internal employees, and people at partners or suppliers. In addition, many government and
private-sector organizations need to understand the impact of a disruptive technology on public
opinion, citizens, elected officials and social networks of influencers. Both government and the
private sector must consider the impact on culture and both the fears and expectations relative
to technology in the lives of individuals.
■ Business experience — Organizations need to understand the impact (risks and opportunities)
on their existing and target business models, processes, information, governance, organization
structure, regulatory requirements, brand, investment portfolio, financial markets and
economies, partnerships, and market or political influence.
■ Technology experience — Organizations must determine how a disruptive trend fits with or
changes the technology experience. Particularly, organizations must realize that a disruptive
technology may be primarily managed within a centralized IT organization, a distributed
technology organization and/or within a primarily business-focused area. EA practitioners need
to work with business and IT leaders to understand both the functional and nonfunctional
(availability, reliability, scalability and so on) opportunities and risks, and integrate these into
their investment requirements.
Actionable Deliverable: Business Viability Proposals

Business viability proposals consider business opportunities against the risk-and-benefit analysis.
The intent is to quantify and qualify the opportunities that are viable for investment. Business
managers are presented with a set of business viability proposals to consider for additional
investment in analysis.
Diagnostic Deliverable: Risk Profiling

Technology risk profiles determine the degree to which a given disruptive technology has achieved
adoption and success rates. It is loosely aligned with the overall maturity of the trend identified in
the ideation phase, but looks more specifically at the maturity of specific use cases versus the
maturity of the technology capabilities or breadth of market adoption.
All future-state use cases for disruptive technologies are not equal. To determine the maturity and
risk of a particular use case, enterprise architects must understand the level of adoption and the
reported levels of success. For example, 3D printing has been used to manufacture parts on-
demand in remote sites, but the level of adoption of 3D printing technology for this use case is low.
So, while there is an opportunity, it is not broadly proven, and the risk of deployment remains high.
Therefore, the maturity of this use case is still relatively low because of limited adoption.
Another factor is the level of reported success. A particular use case for a technology may be
broad, but the number of reported successful cases remains low. In this situation, the use case may
be driven more by hype than by business results, and the risk of deployment in this use case
remains high. Use cases that are mature will have a broader level of adoption and a higher reported
success rate.

Diagnostic Deliverable: Benefit Profiling

Enterprise architects must assess the benefits by analyzing the potential impact on business
outcomes and determining the target benefits in measurable terms. To understand the benefits,
enterprise architects can research the reported success rates and metrics experienced by early
adopters of a technology. This must then be translated to the specific anticipated benefits within the
organization.
For example, if other organizations leveraged gamification to increase customer referrals and
product knowledge, it is reasonable to infer that similar benefits can be achieved by implementing a
similar solution. Research is required to understand the potential benefits and to determine how
those benefits can be realized in the organization. Enterprise architects must also consider that
benefits reported in public sources and by vendors are often overstated, and should attempt to
engage early adopters to gain a better understanding of the actual benefits that were realized and
any additional challenges or lessons learned.
Diagnostic Deliverable: Readiness Assessment

Enterprise architects must also consider the organization's readiness for adopting new
technologies. There may be structural or cultural factors that may inhibit the adoption of new
technologies. One of the most common inhibitors is the organization's personality profile. Different
organizations perceive technology adoption in different ways. Since the early 1990s, Gartner has
applied a technology risk aggressiveness segmentation to categorize the different styles of
technology adoption and exploitation by firms. Borrowing from psychology, we applied a
"personality types" framework to organizational culture. At its core, we still refer to a simple
enterprise segmentation of Type A as risk-aggressive, Type B as risk-moderate and Type C as risk-
averse (for the fullest in-depth exploration, see "Introducing the Enterprise Personality Profile").
Enterprise architects must consider the organization's personality profile as a determinant of
readiness.
Actions:
■ Examine direct, indirect, derivative and combinatorial impact analysis, including human,
business and technology experiences. Develop diagnostic deliverables, such as capability
models, personas and business storylines, that help to illustrate the impact to business and IT
leaders.
■ Clearly identify key pain points and clear opportunities (in terms of human, business and
technology experiences). Measure the impact of trends against these items.
■ Gain a seat at the strategy planning table by thinking and acting like a strategist and
collaborating with business leaders.

Phase 3: Catalyze Business Value From Disruptive-Technology Opportunities by

Determining the Impacts and Creating Transformation Roadmaps
In all cases, enterprise architects must focus on creating actionable deliverables to have an impact
on business outcomes, and planning for disruptive-technology change is no different. Having
completed the ideation, rationalization and evaluation phases, enterprise architects must plan for
transformation. The primary actionable deliverable is the innovation strategic plan, which provides
business and IT leaders with specific recommendations for projects to be initiated to capitalize on
disruptive opportunities (see Figure 5).
Figure 6. Phase 3 Transformation and Example Actionable, Diagnostic and Enabling Deliverables
In addition to providing specific recommendations to management for approval, the innovation

strategic plan provides the handoff to program management and project teams to begin work on the
initiatives. The responsibility for carrying out innovation projects is transferred to the projects. During
the handoff, it is essential to provide explicit guidance and high-level goals, but enterprise architects
must be vigilant not to fall into the trap of becoming part of the project team and having an ongoing
involvement in the implementation of disruptive technologies. Enterprise architects should plan for a

clean transfer of responsibility for a disruptive technology to the project, and assume the role of
providing architecture oversight to innovation projects in progress as they would with any other
project.
Actionable Deliverable: Innovation Strategic Plan

The innovation strategic plan is clearly the most important actionable deliverable in this process. In
the previous phases, management is asked to consider additional investment in analysis — a
relatively low-cost, low-risk decision. However, the innovation strategic plan is a request to fund a
set of projects, moving from analysis to initiating projects. This plan turns the viable set of
opportunities into actionable initiatives with a comprehensive strategy that will identify key decisions
that need to be made, business value analysis, roadmapping and investment requirements. Through
the process, enterprise architects must have clearly demonstrated the business value in moving
forward with additional investments in project resources.
Diagnostic Deliverable: Impact Appraisal

Enterprise architects must consider the broad impacts of technology innovation projects, including
the business, human and technical impacts previously discussed. At this point, it is important to
consider the collateral impacts of innovation projects in combination.
Enterprise architects must also consider and mitigate potential collisions between projects. A
collision is when two or more projects are acting to change the same business component, solution
or technology. By identifying collisions before they occur, enterprise architects can develop
strategies to mitigate the impacts by combining projects into programs, or sequencing change
projects.
Diagnostic Deliverable: Gaps and Opportunities

Enterprise architects must ensure the required business capabilities are in place, prior to initiating
innovation projects, including people, process and technology. For example, if a specific innovation
project requires additional network capacity, that would be considered a gap that must be
addressed.
Skills gaps are perhaps the most important gaps to consider in innovation planning. Innovation
projects almost always require skills that are not currently available in the organization, and
enterprise architects must consider how these skills gaps will be addressed, either by sourcing
talent externally or by developing in-house skills.
Diagnostic Deliverable: Roadmap

The innovation strategic plan is delivered as a roadmap that identifies the projects along a timeline,
typically over the tactical planning horizon. Enterprise architects must consider the order of projects
on the timeline, taking into account the business opportunity, dependencies and collisions to ensure
that the projects that address the most significant business outcomes are prioritized first,
dependent projects are in place and collisions are avoided.

Innovation roadmaps are a primary communications tool, but no one "right" format exists that works
well in all organizations. In our experience, each organization is unique in the style and detail that
are required to communicate to the stakeholders in a way that is visually meaningful and accurate
and with the appropriate level of detail.
Actions:
■ Consider the human, business and technical impacts of innovation projects, as well as
collisions between change initiatives.
■ Assess the skills gaps for the disruptive technology, and determine the availability of skills in the
market to understand the risks of skills shortages.
■ Create a transformation roadmap that provides a graphical representation of a program of
innovation projects and communicates the appropriate information to key stakeholders.
■ Carefully plan for the transfer of responsibility of a disruptive technology to the project that
ultimately will be responsible for the implementation and the realization of the business
outcomes.
Gartner Recommended Reading

Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.
"Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2016"
"Top Strategic Predictions for 2016 and Beyond: The Future Is a Digital Thing"
"Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2015"
"Cool Vendors 2015: Business and Things, the Next Innovation Frontier"
"Predicts 2016: Five Key Trends Driving Enterprise Architecture Into the Future"
Evidence
1 "EA Practitioners Have Significant Influence on $1.1 Trillion in Enterprise IT Spend."
2 "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2015."
3 "Top Strategic Predictions for 2016 and Beyond: The Future Is a Digital Thing."
4 "Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2016."
5Of 3,656 inquiries in 2014 and 2015 with leading EA organizations by Gartner's EA team,
approximately 10% (340) were focused on driving innovation.
6 "Follow the Leaders: Digital Business Is a Big Opportunity to Evolve Your EA Practice."

7 "Gartner's Hype Cycles for 2015: Five Megatrends Shift the Computing Landscape."
Note 1 Use by Vanguard Enterprise Architects

This approach will clearly be of interest to vanguard enterprise architects who are individuals or
teams of individuals within EA practices focusing on leading and driving innovation with disruptive
technologies and new or reinvigorated business models (Mode 2) in order to deliver business
outcomes (see "Digital Business Disruption Drives New Focus for Enterprise Architecture on
Technology Innovation").

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How Vanguard Enterprise Architects Lead

Analyst(s): Brian Burke, Betsy Burton, Mike J. Walker

As the rate of technological innovation increases, EA leaders are challenged

■ Proactively ideate disruptive-technology trends, including evaluating their capabilities, use

This research note is restricted to the personal use of rxo4@psu.edu.

Strategic Planning Assumptions............................................................................................................. 3

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Figure 1. Leading the Enterprise Response to Disruptive Technologies................................................... 4

Strategic Planning Assumptions

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Figure 1. Leading the Enterprise Response to Disruptive Technologies

Source: Gartner (March 2016)

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Gartner, Inc. | G00299268 Page 5 of 22

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Figure 2. Ideation Funnel: Stage Gates in Disruptive-Technology Evaluations

Source: Gartner (March 2016)

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Source: Gartner (March 2016)

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Actionable Deliverable: Exploratory Technology Proposals

Diagnostic Deliverable: Technology Analysis

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Diagnostic Deliverable: Market Analysis

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Diagnostic Deliverable: Ideation Analysis

Diagnostic Deliverable: Opportunity Identification

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Phase 1: Rationalize and Anchor Innovation Opportunities to Business Outcomes

Source: Gartner (March 2016)

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Actionable Deliverable: Opportunity Proposals

Diagnostic Deliverable: Business Scenario Analysis

Diagnostic Deliverable: Business Capability Impact Assessment

Diagnostic Deliverable: Opportunity Analysis

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Diagnostic Deliverable: Business Outcome Statements

Phase 2: Evaluate the Opportunities and Risks of a Disruptive Technology, Based on

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Source: Gartner (March 2016)

It is critical for EA practitioners to evaluate the opportunity costs as disruptive-technology effects,

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■ Human experience — Organizations should evaluate the impact of a disruptive trend on