Modern Enterprise Model

The world has changed. Business landscape has changed. Rapid technology evolution and globalization are leading cause for this change. As technology advances, from a linear evolution in the past to more rapid exponential evolution, organizations are forced to change how they do IT to avoid getting disrupted. Gone are the days when enterprises can be laggards and still be competitive. In today’s market, if an organization is not taking advantage of modern technologies to meet the needs of the business, it will become a competitive disadvantage and a fast lane to eventual demise.

Modern Enterprise Framework comprises of two different types of services following the current demarcation betweenIT operations and application development. However, unlike in traditional IT, there is no need for a clear boundary between these two groups of services. They are:

• Foundational Services: Services focussed on the components needed to build the modern IT platform which includes infrastructure components, infrastructure and application monitoring tools, database services, application lifecycle management tools, etc..
• Higher Order Services: Application Services built on top of Foundational Services or procured from third party sources such as Software as a Service offerings focussed on business needs.

Foundational Services are the equivalent of application infrastructure with seamless elasticity and automation. It may involve an abstracted platform (PaaS) or DIY platform with IaaS (IaaS+). However, the Modern Enterprise Model adds a requirement that higher order services should be decoupled from both the underlying platform and infrastructure in order to avoid lock-in and ensure portability. The No Lock-In requirement is not about avoiding a lock-in with vendors (which is also preferable) but it is about avoiding the tight coupling with the underlying technologies so that organization can future-proof themselves. This future-proofing will help them embrace newer technologies faster in the rapidly evolving technology landscape.

The Modern Enterprise Model requires that Higher Order Services should follow the prescription of The Composable Enterprise Framework put forward by Jonathan Murray. This framework highlights The Component Organization Model to describe how to look at the organization holistically and, then, decompose it functionally into various components and The Component Architecture Model which talks about the IT wrapper around these organizational functions.

I will be digging deeper into these topics in the future but, in short,

Modern Enterprise Model = The Composable Enterprise Framework + Portability Requirement