Enterprises striving to unlock value through digital products face a pivotal shift towards product-centric management, a transformation that carries its share of challenges. To navigate this journey successfully, close collaboration between Enterprise Architects and Digital Product Managers is essential. Together, they can craft the ideal strategy to deliver digital products on a grand scale. Join us in this session as we shed light on the critical interactions and activities that foster synergy between Enterprise Architects and Digital Product Managers. Discover how this collaboration paves the way for effective product-centric management, enabling enterprises to harness the full potential of their digital offerings.

1. Digital Product-Centric Enterprise and
Enterprise Architecture
Tan Eng Tsze
Principal Lecturer & Consultant
Digital Strategy and Leadership

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isstet@nus.edu.sg
Enterprise Architect with many years of experience in Digital and IT.
• Experience in Enterprise Architecture, Agile Architecture, Business Architecture, Data
Architecture, Application Architecture & Security Architecture
• Consulted and developed Enterprise Architecture for public and private sector and the most
recent for a Healthcare company, Gaming and Energy operators in Singapore; and also
advised on architecture implementation strategies to modernise their architectures to
transition towards a Digital Enterprise
• Master and Bachelor degrees in Computer & Information Science, NUS
• Professional certifications in TOGAF, Agile Architecture, SABSA, DPBoK, COBIT and ITIL
Tan Eng Tsze

3. Learning Outcome
Upon completion of this session, you will be able to understand:
 The Digital-Product Centric Enterprise and Architecture
• EA in Digital Product-Centric Enterprise

4. Digital Enterprise
The Digital Enterprise is about applying digital
technology to adapt or change:
• The Strategy of the Enterprise
• The Product or Services it markets
• The Experience it delivers to customers,
employees and other stakeholders
• Its Operating Model

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Architecting The Dual Transformation
Two major drivers of Digital and Agile Transformation:
• Customer Experience which drives Digital Transformation
• The Project-to-Product shift which epitomizes Agile Transformation
Source: The Open Group Agile Architecture Standard

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Project Centric vs Product Centric Operating
Model
Project Centric Operating Model Product Centric Operating Model
Deliverable-oriented Outcome-oriented
Scope is agreed in advance Value delivery determined based on the
feedback
Limited time duration No specific time duration; lasts as long as
there is a need
Difficult to change scope or directions, unless
specifically set up to accommodate
Must accommodate market feedback and
directional change
Focus on delivering the plan Focus on delighting the customer
Resources are specifically planned for, but
their commitment is temporary (team is
“brought to the work”)
Resources are assigned long-term to the
product (work is “brought to the team”)

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Which of your organisation has made the transition
from Project to Product Centric Operating Model?
ⓘ Start presenting to display the poll results on this slide.

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The Scaling Crisis
Of 28 million US firms, the majority of firms
(96%) never grow beyond a founder; a small
percentage emerge as a viable team of 8-12,
and even smaller numbers make it to the
stable plateaus of 40-70 and
350-500. The “scaling crisis” is the challenge
of moving from one major level to the next.

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The Role of Architecture
Source: Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge

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Context I – Individual Founder
• The Individual/Founder context addresses “minimum
essential concerns they must address to develop and
sustain a basic digital product”.
• This context represents the bare minimum requirements of
delivering digital value.

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Context I Individual/Founder:
The Role of Architecture and the Architect
Architecture Role
• Used as a communication
medium. Architecture models
communicate very well.
• It provides the necessary
descriptions to communicate the
infrastructure available and its
appropriate use for both
development and delivery
• Use to support and provide
answers to questions about Agile
development and continuous
delivery.
Architect Role
• A communicator and considered
a key enterprise networker.
• Helps to identify existing
infrastructure approaches that
may be embedded in larger
organizations, and to
communicate vetted technical
requirements to the infrastructure
organization to ensure preparation
for new workloads
• Can be approached to provide
guidance in these areas on
demand, based on their practical
experience

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Context II - Team
• The team has a single mission and a cohesive identity, but does
not need a lot of overhead to get the job done.
• The Team context covers the basic elements necessary for a
collaborative product team to achieve success while remaining at
a manageable human scale.
• Establishing team collaboration as a fundamental guiding value is
essential to successful digital product development.
• The team is all in the same location, and can still communicate
informally, but there is enough going on that it needs a more
organized approach to getting work done.

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Context II Team:
The Role of Architecture and the Architect
Architecture Role
• Enterprise Architecture can assist
Product Management by providing
models that map to a given digital
product profile.
• It makes interdependencies explicit,
assuring an holistic view of the digital
product.
• Used to depict processes and
workflows in very simple to very
complex levels of detail
• Provides models to depict how
operations are expected to run
Architect Role
• Can ensure efficacy of
communication and
collaboration.
• Helps to communicate risks and
mitigations
• Able to deliver this support in an
on-demand, service-oriented
manner to meet the operating
tempo of the team.

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Context III – Team of Teams
• The Team of Teams context is a natural evolution of the Teams
context, but one where the number of people and digital
products involved generates complexity.
• Coordinating across a team of teams is the main concern.
• Communication is again key to ensure successful collaboration
and value delivery.

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Context III Team of Teams:
The Role of Architecture and the Architect
Architecture Role
• EA is used to depict
- Portfolios of products
- Processes and control
mechanisms and to identify and
eliminate choke points and for
continuous process improvement
- Interdependencies
- Value Generation, and cost
supporting portfolio
management decision-making
processes
Architect Role
• Continues to ensure that risk is
understood and communication
is effective.
• Ensures that the digital products
work together, leverage each
other, and are appropriately
coupled; thus, modeling and
documenting the move from a
specific digital product to portfolios
of digital products that require
interoperability.

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Context IV – Enduring Enterprise
• The Enduring Enterprise context is about how to manage
an enterprise that has been successful and is now faced
with the realities of operating a sustainable business
over periods of time longer than the next product
cycle.

17. Context IV Enduring Enterprise:
The Role of Architecture and the Architect
Architecture Role
• Helps managing risk
• Guide on Information
Management through
business, data,
application and
technology architecture
Architect Role
• Supports the Enduring
Enterprise in operating a
sustainable business
over periods of time
longer than the next
product cycle

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Enterprise Architecture – Describing
Coherence

19. Learning Outcome
Upon completion of this session, you will be able to understand:
• The Digital-Product Centric Enterprise and Architecture
 EA in Digital Product-Centric Enterprise

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How many of you know what is Enterprise
Architecture?
ⓘ Start presenting to display the poll results on this slide.

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Enterprise Architecture “the city plan”
System Architecture “the building design”
Business
Strategy
Information
Technology
Strategy
Business
Opportunity
Technology
Availability
IT
Architecture
- Information
- Application
- Technology
Planning
Design and
Delivery
Enterprise
wide
focus
Project
focus Strategy
Business Operating Environment
and IT Infrastructure
IT Solutions
Enterprise Architecture
Business
Architecture
- Processes
- Information
- People
- Locations
Transition Planning and Governance
EA provides a mechanism to
instill discipline and control
(governance) to business
and their enabling IT
infrastructures
Source: The Esplanade Company Limited
Source: The Esplanade Company Limited
Governance
&
Management
Enterprise Architecture

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Enterprise Architecture
The process of translating business vision and strategy into
effective enterprise change by creating, communicating, and
improving the key principles and models that describe the
enterprise’s future state and enable its evolution.
(Source: Gartner®)

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Without EA in Digital Product-Centric
Enterprise, what happens?
77 million customer details
stolen
Service down for X days
Costed USD $250 million
Source: Designed for Digital, MIT
Press, Jeanne W. Ross etc, 2019,

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Innovation Dynamics In the Digital Era Have
Changed…
77 million customer details
stolen
Service down for X days
Costed USD $250 million

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Changes in an Application is Inevitable
77 million customer details
stolen
Service down for X days
Costed USD $250 million
We need to support:
• New business requirements
• New non-functional requirements
• Updates to existing technologies
• New technologies

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In the Product-Centric Enterprise, Enterprise
Architects are Challenged!
“If we’re going to have to
do a heavy-weight
architecture which plans for
two to five years into the
future, how can we be
agile? “
“Ideally, that pool of seniors in
your team act as a kind of proxy
architecture committee and we
don’t need to go to someone who
supposedly got the title sitting in
an ivory tower for approval”
Though the architecture discipline is still needed, the architect’s role has
to evolve otherwise they are at risk of being marginalized.
EA as a Centralised function is no longer fit-for-purpose – EA must
evolve their practices into Federated and Loosely-Coupled disciplines

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BDUF?
77 million customer details
stolen
Service down for X days
Costed USD $250 million
Requirements Architect Design / Develop Release
Make all the
important
architecture
decisions here
Easy stuff here How hard is that?
What appears
important here may
not be important
We learn a lot more
about the problem
space and false
assumptions
Much harder that we
thought

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Intentional Architecture
• Definition: A purposeful set of statements, models and decisions that represent
some future architectural state
• Although Big Design Up-Front (BDUF) is incompatible with Agile ways of
working, Intentional Architecture is needed and valuable
• Some up-front intentional architecture prevents waste and accelerates
decision-making
• Intentional architecture should be simple, focused and compact because:
• It is likely to evolve so investing in a detailed model would be wasteful
• It is guided by guardrails imposed by governance

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Emergent Architecture
• The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-
organizing teams ~ Agile Manifesto Principle 11
• Emergence refers to what appears, materializes, or surfaces when a
complex system operates; desired or undesirable functions or outcomes
emerge
• Process of producing deliverables without defining the design or
architecture upfront and allow the architecture to materialize over time in
order to be able to respond to change quicker

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Product Architecture (and Continuous
Product Development)
MVA
Least possible set
of architecture done to
support the MVP to be released
MVP
Facilitates incremental changes to the
product architectures

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Big Design Up Front vs No Big Design Up
Front?
Provide some examples in which you should do the following:
1. Big Design Up Front
2. No Big Design Up Front

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Big Design Up Front
Here are some examples for which you should do more design up front:
• Those with extremely stable requirements, with no changes expected
on the order of years
• Ones for highly isolated environments (for example, space travel,
underwater exploration), for safety reasons
• You've written the exact same piece of software before, with the same
group of people, with no scope changes (You'll get a deadly accurate
estimate for this one)
• For highly constrained environments, such as embedded systems, to
make sure that you consider the constraints for that environment

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No Big Design Up Front
Examples for which you should not do too much up-front design
include:
• Highly variable, changing requirements (on the order of
months or weeks), like most business applications
• Those that need to respond to external factors, such as
market conditions
• When you're not yet sure about many of the business or
technical details

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EA in Product-Centric Digital Enterprise (1)
Source: How can EA support Product Management, Gartner

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EA in Product-Centric Digital Enterprise (2)
• EA to support enterprise wide strategy and decisions to define and support the product
portfolio and products
• The goal of EA is to maintain alignment between business strategy and digital systems
helping business and technology leaders and Product teams balance wide-scale
innovation at speed with architectural integrity. The goal is not to achieve 100%
enforcement at all times; in fact, allowing acceptable levels of deviation and even
duplication amongst Product teams will be the only way to avoid slowing critical
innovation.
• EA acts as an Advisory function and not as a central approver for digital innovation
which has sometimes been the case in traditional management models
• The EA function ensures the enterprise-wide perspective is maintained to help align
activities across product portfolios, foster collaboration between teams, and prevent
large-scale duplication or deviation from architectural standards.

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Enterprise Architecture and Product-Centric
Enterprise
Architecture designed in an agile
context:
• Provides the Vision (Intentional
Architecture) where the team fits in
with their development work
• Gives clear boundaries and guardrails
for the agile product teams to make
their own decisions ( Emerging
Architecture)
• Evolves with the cadence of iterative
and incremental development along
the agile journey (Evolutionary
Architecture) and ensures a proper
alignment between intentional
architecture (top-down) and the
architecture emerging from the
agile product teams (bottom-up)
Enterprise
Architecture
Product
Architecture
Product
Portfolio

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EA in Product-Centric Digital Enterprise (3)
• Reposition and embed Enterprise Architects as
product architects to form a Product Architecture
function within product lines to support Product
Managers, Product Owners and delivery teams
• Create a Platform Architecture as a solid foundation
and reference implementations that support the shared
capabilities that cut across product lines

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Project Model and the Traditional
Architecture Organization

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Product Model and Realigned Architecture
Organization

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Platform Architecture
• A thoughtful product
and platform design
underpins the
transformation
• Platform Architecture
defining the digital
foundations or
platforms on which
products sit
Source: The Big Product and Platform Shift: 5 Actions to get the Transformation Right, McKinsey

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Evolving Governance…
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Integrated Business/IT Governance
1.Quarterly Business Reviews verify that tribes fulfil their
commitments
2.Tribes are monitored by their sponsors, who
progressively release resources to match market growth
needs
3.Tribes evolve autonomously, paced by Agile ceremonies
4.Post mortems are conducted during business reviews;
resource reallocation decisions take team performance
and business situations into account
5.The integrated governance model does not isolate IT
investment decisions anymore. IT investments are a
subset of the investments made by the business to
develop new products or journeys. Investment decisions
are evaluated against business outcome metrics.
6.The Agile governance features need to be adapted to fit
the context, culture and maturity level of each enterprise.

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Enterprise Architecture Practitioner Course

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Mastering Digital Architecture Course

45. Thank you
Tan Eng Tsze
isstet@nus.edu.sg

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