As leader of Forrester’s global Enterprise Architecture Awards, it’s an annual honor and privilege for me to review leading enterprise architecture (EA) practices from around the world and learn from them. In my home region of the Americas, I am additionally honored to announce the winner and runners-up.
The quality of submissions this year was very good, and the runners-up in particular were very close in their scoring, but one clear winner emerged.
Scotiabank is a major Americas bank, named best bank in Canada by Global Finance magazine, with operations in Canada, the US, Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean. Considered as a whole, the sheer scope and range of Scotiabank’s EA activities is industry-leading. Many of its efforts will resonate with other EA teams: reference architecture, portfolio rationalization, and technical standards. This is a very broad-scope EA team, with reach and impact across the full stack of business, data, applications, and technology. What distinguishes Scotiabank is the quantification of EA efforts at a level Forrester has not seen before. The bank has taken the challenge of escaping the EA ivory tower very seriously by showing the business benefits and operational measurement of a modern and accountable EA team.
In Forrester’s outcome-driven EA model, there are four primary benefits: revenue/mission outcome, customer experience/employee experience (CX/EX), cost efficiency, and risk reduction. The most mature architecture groups can show a line of sight to all four types of benefits, as Scotiabank has.
Revenue, Mission, And CX/EX Benefits
Scotiabank’s EA aligns architects with strategic portfolio priorities (what we term a “consultative” engagement model), has developed 16 reference architectures, and led modernization efforts to increase agility and CX via microservices and cloud approaches. Accelerating innovations’ time to market by improving the flexibility and agility of platform architectures is one of the key EA strategies Forrester has observed over the past few years. At Scotiabank, 72% of initiatives can support any country for reuse with a single-code-base platform or are building reusable APIs. The EA team tracks modernization progress, with 92% of assessed initiatives adopting modern approaches (standardized processes, modern build-and-deploy methods, reuse.) This again improves overall enterprise agility. Finally, the team has improved EX by reducing EA reviews by 75% and moving to a trusted governance model, including increasingly automated controls.
Cost And Risk Benefits
As discussed previously, reducing portfolio sprawl, improving cost structures, and by extension reducing the attack surface are still business benefits, especially when you can quantify (as Scotiabank has) run-rate financial impacts. In Scotiabank’s case, the EA team cites a $100 million run-rate reduction through cloud transformation (migrating more than 900 apps and 13,000 servers), $42 million run-rate savings through decommissioning more than 300 applications over the next three years, and partnering to identify an additional $10 million in cost reduction across applications and infrastructure.
Architecture has measurably improved its own efficiencies, as demonstrated by 40% fewer reviews and 8% more initial approvals. In some cases, one might be concerned about architecture review not catching as many issues, but these improvements are presented in the context of other improvements in the EA engagement model, such as a consultative model (typically more proactive than review), reference architectures, patterns, principles, and improved technology portfolio governance.
EA Priorities And Capabilities
EA collaboration at Scotiabank has standing capabilities in an EA review board, a technology standards review board, and a chief architects’ council. It also shows strong programmatic relevance, with EA participating systematically in critical workstreams such as customer information systems modernization, cloud transformation, Salesforce implementation, and IT operations cost optimization. Artifacts are understood strategically, in terms of patterns, roadmaps, and principles, and there is a clear line of sight from these artifacts to EA services and governance. Again, EA governance at Scotiabank is increasingly embedded into delivery processes, reducing friction and increasing automation.
Innovations
Finally, every year Forrester seeks to identify innovative EA practices as part of ongoing research into modern EA trends. In Scotiabank’s case, the EA team clearly reflects the “from design to data” trend that we are hearing more and more about from leading EA groups. Scotiabank has created an IT4IT analytics environment, Scotiacube, that “offers a comprehensive view of our portfolio by analyzing various data points, including financials, application/server information, and business capabilities.”
Scotiabank’s EA team is also deepening the effectiveness of platform services, another key innovation that EA groups are aligning with and driving in recent years. Rather than time-consuming, conflict-ridden post-design reviews, platforms embed organizational consensus on “how to do things” and accelerate innovation. Time-consuming reviews of architecture decisions happen at the platform level, and solutions deployed there by definition are architecturally acceptable. Scotiabank’s EA is supporting this approach through specific platform collaborations, as well as broad EA governance principles.
Runners-Up: Fannie Mae & SouthState Bank
Enterprise architecture plays a vital role at Fannie Mae (the US Federal National Mortgage Association) in supporting and advancing the business strategy by integrating technology, ensuring agility and scalability, managing risk, and aligning IT capabilities with the overall strategic vision of the organization.
SouthState Bank is a large regional bank with branches throughout the Southeast United States. Enterprise architects there both review solutions and embed in larger platform initiatives. The EA team is employing automation for quicker turnarounds, expediting over 70% of EA reviews, and has developed extensive configuration management database (CMDB) integrations.
Thanks again to The Open Group for partnering in publicity and judging. The awards have clearly benefited from the participation, reach, and mindshare since this partnership was established.
