Traditionally, the enterprise architecture (EA) function was considered an overhead by many organizations. But it can prove to be a catalyst if reimagined and used to drive strategy and execution for digital transformation. How are progressive leaders adopting EA for digital success?

Contributor

• • Praveen Moturu, Vice President and Chief Enterprise Architect, Mars Inc.

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Transcript 

Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Good morning and welcome to CTN and to learn more about CTN, please visit ciotalknetwork.com and the topic for today is EA As The Digital Catalyst. So let’s talk about enterprise architecture, which was traditionally considered an overhead by many organizations. They would keep it on the side. They will say that it slows us down but then there is a new wave of enterprise architecture that at least we are hearing that it can work as a catalyst. It can help you reimagine how do you drive the strategy and execution for digital transformation. So who is able to turn EA around on its head? Who are and how are progressive leaders adopting enterprise architecture for success in the digital realm? So to discuss all of this I have with me Praveen Moturu.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:54]:
Praveen is the Chief Enterprise Architect at Mars. Hey Praveen, how are you?

Praveen Moturu [00:01:00]:
Good morning Sanjog. It’s a pleasure to have you along with team members here with on CTO network.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:08]:
Great, thanks so much. Now let’s dig in directly. So we are talking about enterprise architecture. Let’s talk about or rather do a compare and contrast. Enterprise architecture as a function of course is very important and it can be strategic but it was not given the importance earlier in many cases where they felt it just slows people down. They’re trying to build this ideal state which is not even possible to execute on and that’s why while that existed but they always had a fight upstream to try to deal with things and to make people understand why they should adopt what’s being suggested as part of enterprise architecture. Now in this digital realm, you are and many other enterprise architects and CXOs are claiming that we can use enterprise architecture to our advantage and it will not slow us down, it’ll in fact help us bring agility.

Sanjog Aul [00:02:09]:
Tell me what changed?

Praveen Moturu [00:02:13]:
Great question Sanjog. I think traditionally enterprise architecture has been established in organizations to define strategy, define vision and more consultative roles. That’s where I think most of the organizations have positioned enterprise architecture in the past where we are seeing with the shifts in agile ways of doing thanks to digital transformation, with the focus on customer, consumer and stakeholder values, it becomes more relevant. Architecture doesn’t stay at defining vision and strategy, but also continuously and incrementally add value while taking it to execution and ensuring that the vision is put to value. So that’s a huge shift and change in the way architecture teams needs to think in terms of being more agile to address the agility we need along with being adaptive and being flexible thinking both short term, midterm, long term, at the same time a critical component of alignment to the objectives, goals and the organization’s value drivers and making them really see value to earn the trust and sit at the table.

Sanjog Aul [00:03:28]:
So what you’re telling is of course how I would have defined enterprise architecture earlier and I’m assuming I would not change the core definition, has the relevance changed?

Praveen Moturu [00:03:43]:
Of course the relevance has changed because as we are moving at a greater pace, the pace of change is very relevant to the conversation of how do we position architecture to ensure that they have the end to end visibility, they have outward in perspective and the ability to connect the dots across the enterprise. While there are several SWAT teams or program teams or product teams working more in a siloed nature, there’s somebody who needs to drive the true alignments between these products or these projects and that’s the shift that brings more importance to enterprise architecture at the current moment.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:23]:
If you think about in the digital realm, we are trying to be agile or we rather are trying to shift things because we don’t know what’s going to come next and how we can best leverage what is made available as an innovation in the marketplace or in terms of where the customer wants to go, the speed of shift is changing quite a bit and if we continue to shift things that quickly, which is in contra, it is in contrast to what enterprise architecture suggests, that okay, you have a blueprint and yes, you would continue to evolve it, but you are not going to continue to shift it and let that be used as a benchmark to evaluate any and everything we do at the execution level. That becomes like a guideline, like the holy grail but if the holy grail keeps shifting, it’s truly not an architecture. It’s like someone keep redrawing what the blueprint looks like but doesn’t that create more problems that you’re changing the very benchmark and it could have regression issues and you might keep shifting one thing and the other thing becomes weaker and you don’t notice and then you try to have the rest of the organization aligned to it and it actually creates more chaos.

Praveen Moturu [00:05:35]:
Excellent question, Sanjog. I think the way I will address this is generally enterprise architecture teams have the blueprint, we call them digital reference models or capability models right across all the business process, business capability, working with information/data, then looking at applications and solutions and looking at integration, security and technology layers. So these blueprints as you discuss are in place to serve as reference points as standards and reusable assets that we already invested in but coming back to your question, since There is the agile nature and continuous change and continuous innovation and continuous improvements. The way we can term or coin this approach would be. We can understand this by a pace layered approach. A face laid approach is really telling what is the pace of change and what is the impact.

Praveen Moturu [00:06:32]:
First of all we need to look at our value drivers and key performance indicators for the enterprise in terms of OGSM objectives, goals, strategies and metrics. If we understand those, then we need to align our blueprints in such a way that we are using the face layered approach where the core systems are the foundational fundamental platforms are not changing that often and they are loosely coupled and a layered approach using API based integration. With that said, the core systems is a foundational rock of the reference architecture for any enterprise. On the top of it would be a layer of systems of differentiation where we are building and plugging in tailored solutions to meet a statistic, niche advantage or a competitive advantage. That’s number two layer and the third layer would come as a systems of engagement or systems of innovation and this layered approach will help us to say where more changes are happening at the system of innovation, system of engagement layer and the system of differentiation. What is our core layer remains less changing yet provide very loose coupling and API based approach where we define these as microservices architecture or headless architecture solutions that will clearly support the face of change in multiple layered approach.

Sanjog Aul [00:07:57]:
Now what you just shared looks like an evolution to the traditional EA which used to be very tightly integrated and I understand the services architecture requires you to be loosely coupled and which is how the rest of the world is going through. That’s at the technical level rather the geek levels. You spoke about also layering or also designing it so that anytime when a custom things happen or any shift happens, it doesn’t become a rip and replace of the enterprise architecture, you just go to that module and fix it. Is that how you feel every enterprise architecture based blueprint be shifted to if they want to see any relevance of that EA model to work in this digital realm?

Praveen Moturu [00:08:41]:
Absolutely, I think I will give you three key points of to pursue here. One, we talk about platforms, two product and three, the processes. So I’ll start with processes. Processes are the way we look at business capabilities and understand the whole business model and understand what capabilities are core, what capabilities are differentiating and what capabilities are more innovative or emerging. So that capability centric perspective would help you to connect the business capabilities of the functions and processes to the digital or technology capabilities. So that’s really key. That’s number one number two, when we talk about platforms, the platforms need to be supportive, flexible and also the ability to support multiple products on

Praveen Moturu [00:09:31]:
the top. Then the product can be variants of how business wants to do a strategic function or a strategic process for a specific region or a business segment itself. So having the substitute of a platforms to solidly support, having the thought process, taking a business capability centric approach and enabling these into products. That three pointer approach would help you to think how enterprise architects can evolve in the future in terms of both technology, platforms, products and solutions and as well in terms of how you’re looking at business capabilities. So you can establish a true enterprise blueprint that’s flexible and also that’s connected with a layered approach.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:18]:
So traditionally enterprise architecture leans towards perfectionism, means this is where we ought to go and rightfully because you’re trying to make that as a blueprint, something which everybody in the organization can look up to now to make it relevant for digital, where we don’t know where to go, say in the next quarter or next six months. That means you have to experiment. So do you keep experimentation out of the EA or the EA changes are going to be subsequent to the experimentation done and insight achieved and then we know okay, this is the kind of shift. So is EA following what is the core tenet of digital which is experimentation and isn’t there a conflict because it is always trying to be perfect and digital says no, you cannot be perfect if you want to evolve.

Praveen Moturu [00:11:15]:
Great point. So let’s define EA tends towards perfection aspect. So as we have shifted to be more agile and more take iterative and incremental approach, we have to our enterprise architecture organizations have adapted more agile, adaptive and aligned methods to support test and learns or fail fast. I think that there are a couple of points here I wanted to also emphasize on most of these test and learns and fail fast are great, but at the same time, it has to be driven by the KPIs, it has to be driven by value drivers and we have introduced several methods in architecture to cater to these services as well and these methods include like a fast track self service giving them some guardrails and tenants so that they can clearly understand where do we start, where do we end and how do we keep the rest of the architecture in loop. While everybody in the enterprise is eligible to conduct these tests and learns, still the focus needs to be on cost, the value we are doing and most importantly this is where architecture comes into picture is how do we connect it to a product lifecycle, how do we connect it what we are trying to do with these tests and learns to show an end to end value

Praveen Moturu [00:12:32]:
because I’ll give you an example. Anybody can look at a customer or consumer experience data and identify that there’s an insight that will tell that the customers are unsubscribing more in a particular region. Knowing that insight or fact, how do we connect it to the downstream processes, how do we connect it to the organizational people model and how do we connect to it boundary systems to take actions out of it. That is something that would require an architect to look at a blueprint and understand what are the different layers that are getting engaged in delivering this flows loop end to end process. So while we are excited about this test and learns and fast and to fail and dirty all are good but some there should be some method and structure to this madness. Otherwise what will happen is we’ll eventually put a lot of money in these tests and learns and we will be hard to find how they connect into our product lifesets, our product lines which will really turn them into value and then also make sure that it’s an end to end incremental innovation rather than we just fix the top layer or just go behind a shiny object and deliver something. So that’s end to end aspect of delivering a closed loop value model is where enterprise architecture is shifting to bring value to the organizations.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:51]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners, we’ll be right back and Praveen, when we come back, how about you going through your journey at Mars. I’m assuming you did something good and you even won awards on how enterprise architecture helped you go digital. So in that let’s take the context of on one hand, the Mars business leaders must be trying to figure out what is the new business landscape, what is the new customer looking for and then there is a desire by the business leaders to go experiment, fail small, fail fast and here comes Praveen and his group which says folks, we have to have a structure to the madness. How did you bring it all together and got those business leaders to recognize that they need you and at the same time you also found a balance between you trying to build that perfect structure and them trying to get to learn through experimentation what they want. How was it on the ground? Please stay tuned listeners.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:51]:
We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:15:53]:
Welcome back. So Praveen, your business wanted to experiment. They wanted to understand what’s new, more or different that’s happening in the business landscape and the customer’s mindset or the way they are behaving the way they want to consume the products and on one, on the other side you bringing this ideal model of how things should be run. I’m sure there was tug of war, I’m sure there was struggle and or some compromises made. Tell us more.

Praveen Moturu [00:16:20]:
Great, Sanjog at Mars I think when Enterprise architecture was established 18 months ago, the starter was very clear. We were lucky to have the leadership really focus on how do we put enterprise architecture to action. It started with the first objective of Mars is doubling its revenue. So as we are taking a digital transformation approach, we need some structure rather than adding more different test and learn and bring different technologies and add complexity to what we are doing. So there should be some structural approach to how we do things, that’s number one. The ask number two is we have not invested heavily in cleaning up the technologies or rationalization of applications where we ended up with several applications across the enterprise which resulted due to mergers, acquisitions and takeovers and divestitures. Can we take it from a bottom up approach and make sure that we clean the foundational blueprint, foundational portfolio so that as we add more, acquire more and grow more in terms of business and do more of this digital interaction, we’ll have a solid foundation.

Praveen Moturu [00:17:29]:
So that’s the second ask. So I think with that clear charter we have established a team that existed with Mars in its disparate form and we bought some new players into the enterprise architecture team and we started to establish the architecture functions and here are the tenants that are that we have done differently this time. So the first one is speed and agility. When we talk about speed and agility there’s a difference, clear difference between speeding versus going speed. It’s pretty much as you drive your car onto a road, there’s a 40 minute, 40 mile speed limit. So you stay within the 40 miles. Then you know what is speeding and once you go speeding beyond 40 miles, then you don’t have the guardrails that can protect you. So this is similar way.

Praveen Moturu [00:18:17]:
What we have come up with is a minimum viable architecture which will clearly articulate what are our standards and reusable assets and most importantly, we educated people that if you use these minimum viable architectures, you can run with steel because it’s reusability, it’s about organizational readiness, it’s about the capability. So that’s a fundamental aspect of how architecture can enable speed and agility. That’s number one and at the same time we did a monthly sprint for architecture practice. So what it includes is every month we look at what’s a pipeline, we do weekly scrums, daily scrums as needed and make sure that on a monthly basis the deliverables from architects are very visible, the decisions we make are very visible and also we drove application and technology rationalization program.

Praveen Moturu [00:19:08]:
So we clearly called out what applications were sunset, what technologies were rationalized. So that gave a good communication of what architecture is doing both from top down digital transformation versus bottom up rationalization approach. The second phase is a continuous cycle. So to have architecture relevant to large transformations you need to stay relevant in terms of as we educated that we are doing monthly communications in terms of what’s happening across the enterprise which will view a good perspective on is ability to understand the enterprise. The third one is digital transformation. So as we are driving through our architecture practice, we take top down priority approach, understand the drivers and drive those priorities to have the right solutions and platforms, in terms of digital transformation. Outward in knowledge, this is the most important. Most of the enterprises expect enterprise architecture team to have a good acumen of industry trend,

Praveen Moturu [00:20:10]:
a good acumen of business trends and technology trends. So we were able to establish peer to peer network connections across multiple peers in the CPG industry, manufacturing industry to pull them towards and share challenges that we are facing and learn from experiences. Again, these partnerships don’t stop with industry peers but these guys are extending towards our strategic technology vendors and also integration partners. The last but most important thing, this is where the change is very value driven. This is about collaboration. So we understand there are several architects across the enterprise and we made equal attempts to pull all the architects together on a virtual forum across the globe and pull the architects together first thing then we work with the commercial team, we work with the delivery organizations, we brought in with the design thinking teams which is I think best approach to for our success out credit it for and without collaboration it could not have been accomplished. What we are doing after 18 months here.

Sanjog Aul [00:21:18]:
Any specific pushbacks or any specific tug of wars that you had to deal with before it assembled and cut?

Praveen Moturu [00:21:27]:
Absolutely, I think, see we initially I would say Mars is a more people’s organization, very much focused on people and relationships and I won’t say there are pushbacks, but it’s about understanding and we have requested for an opportunity to be very precise. We have requested, we talk to people, leaders and also bottom up support organizations to clearly articulate, say this is our opportunity. We, we need to do it as part of corporate citizenship for Mars and the change is needed now more than ever because if you don’t come together and position enterprise architecture to help facilitate and drive and be in the center of this transformation, it would be really a complex situation that we need to deal with.

Praveen Moturu [00:22:12]:
So we were able to communicate that message and seek for an opportunity and when we did that, as I said, we brought them all as partners for this transformation and architecture. So we clearly called out that architecture, organization and architecture mindset are similar and whatever you are doing for your enterprise, for your organization, for your project or product, we just need to bring those thoughts into the enterprise alignment so that we can help each other and at the same time we committed to drive this with speed. I think that’s what is the fundamental difference and the prospect they issued with us is one of the reasons why we are here.

Sanjog Aul [00:22:53]:
So one is that you got the business leaders to recognize the value and the way you can be flexible or how EA can be flexible in terms of making things happen and everybody moves forward. Did you have to make some accommodations in your enterprise architecture approach and modeling to accommodate some shifts or some quirks that you found in the way business, where the business wants to go. Was it only accommodations done from the business side to accommodate EA or even EA was evolved or there was some learning for you as a group to accommodate business. Did you shift some things?

Praveen Moturu [00:23:31]:
There was a big learning and shift of how we approach things in traditional ways of EA. We do a lot of the background work or the industry research and we evaluate options, alternatives and come up with a recommendation and then we socialize that recommendation with the rest of the teams and then take additional feedback and we solidify the recommendation. What we have learned is this is a important lessons learned collaborating and being part of a decision making. What we used to do in a traditional way is we have already done the work, as I said, and then we have come up with an recommendation but what we realized is when we go with engage these business stakeholders and rest of the IT stakeholders. We need to brainstorm scenarios, we need to brainstorm outcomes, we need to truly engage them to be a decision partner rather than already going with a three defined mindset and laying out the recommendation and say hey, this is what we think needs to be done. So that is a shift in how we started to do and we have taken help of a design thinking approach where we put the customer or the stakeholder or the value consumer into the center of the equation and we define the problem first very clearly and then connect it to the value drivers. So that helped us to understand what are the scenarios we need to plan, how do we understand the experience map? How do you understand the journey maps of the stakeholder experience? So once we get to that level of engagement, then all the stakeholders feel that they are part of the decision making.

Praveen Moturu [00:25:07]:
They really understand the pros and cons of one versus other and that helps us to drive the solution very successfully without having challenges down the line.

Sanjog Aul [00:25:18]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back and let’s talk about the simplification that we may have to do on the enterprise architecture for us to be able to handle or rather deliver on the agility mandate but is there a risk? Could you go ahead and make the whole process agile but in that process also oversimplify EA which will undermine the value it would otherwise bring? What’s that balance that we need to strike so that EA is able to support agility but not reducing its own effectiveness? Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back and discuss.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:58]:
Welcome back. So yes, we want to simplify things because that’s the recipe to get agility introduced into an organization but does that mean enterprise architecture has to be simplified to a degree? That it starts losing its effectiveness or the very core that it is built upon? What’s the best way to strike a balance? Where we eat the cake and have it too? Praveen, what did you do on the ground, on this front?

Praveen Moturu [00:27:28]:
Yes, I think striking that balance is important. The way we provide services to the organization or work with the stakeholders across the organization is we have a few collaboration touch points I would call where we wanted to drive most of the engagements through fast track and self service as described, we defined some minimum viable architecture and guardrails that we would let the stakeholders or the consumers take that and adapt and use it to drive speed. At the same time, we have checkpoints where we would like to look into these activities in the lenses of security, in the lenses of cost, and in the lenses of new technology because these are the three key things because security comes along with ensuring that the solutions are secure, but also compliance. Compliance is going to be really key and auditability. So that is one category of enterprise risks that we track at the same time,

Praveen Moturu [00:28:23]:
cost, as we keep adding these as capabilities, there’s a cost aspect we need to worry about because if you’re not maintaining that cost balance, what happens is we could do only a few things with this money we have. So ensuring that the cost is getting the best optimized cost and doing more with less approach at the same time as we introduce new technology to introduce the overhead across our technology stacks, all in terms of putting the technology for readiness and also putting the model in place to make sure that this technology is supported. So these are the three tenants I would call especially on the security and we ensure that the data aspect is classified well and then we use the security control lens, the cost lens and the new technology lens where we give enough coaching to the teams to say where they can drive fast, drive with speed. At the same time establish that balance to not worry about the enterprise risk

Praveen Moturu [00:29:25]:
at the same time, also worry about the cost and complexity.

Sanjog Aul [00:29:30]:
See the things that you mentioned, which is compliance, mandate or security. Of course today business understands the value of not jeopardizing those interests and that’s why they will step up and support you but then I’ve yet to see any organization which says I have an unlimited budget go do what you want to do. So you got to be able to get creative. When EA pursuing speed, pursuing perfectionism, pursuing tackling the flexibility aspect, or offering flexibility to the initiative, you are bound to go through situations where you end up spending more or you realize that you’re going to end up spending more than what you started with and going back to the business to say, oops, I’m sorry, I need more money because we don’t have enough. So you would have had budget challenges and you would have had business case development challenges. It will be a good idea for us to learn listeners to learn where are the pitfalls and gotchas if someone goes on this journey so that they don’t have those oops moments.

Praveen Moturu [00:30:50]:
That’s a tricky question and also it’s a time and case, it’s a case by case situation.

Sanjog Aul [00:30:55]:
What happened with you? The goal is to see what happened with you. When did you feel you had to where you over you overextended or you had a challenge or what you thought is going to happen. It did not happen and that’s where you had to take a step back. It’s up to you how much you can reveal as details but for the list, for the intent of the listeners to learn from your journey.

Praveen Moturu [00:31:21]:
I would be comfortable and confident to say wherever enterprise architecture is engaged upfront and engage thoroughly into the problem solving, into the opportunity. I have not come across that example that we say hey, we have gone through a oops moment, said we need more money or we need more unplanned activities because the whole concept of engaging enterprise architecture in the front would help you to plan better, prepare better, have the alternatives and backup plan what if scenarios and then establish a tiered model which is breaking this big chunk of problem into chunks and then every three months sprints or two months sprints will be successful. Then you take the next step. So it’s not going to be that you go into a project for six months to eight months and then all of a sudden you realize that hey, I need more money or I have done some oops moments, but I have seen situations where there’s not been architecture thinking in the front and ability to transform the legacy into a modern architecture yet not seeking the right approach and not centering the alternatives and centering the industry best practices where we have to pause projects in the middle and then go back to the business and say hey, we have some lessons learned, it’s not going to work and we have to reconsider where we are, what we are doing in this space. There are situations like that. Point of view here is very clear.

Praveen Moturu [00:32:51]:
Whenever we are taking any problem or any opportunity, first we need to define what is the value driver, what is the business case and what is the problem we are trying to solve. That becomes the lion’s share of the solution itself. The second piece is what are the alternatives we have, which alternative is best and how do we splunk it into into segments or splunk it into sprints rather than draw a 18 month year, trial program or a project as you do breakpoints, you should be able to know ahead and early with an MVP approach or maybe with the initial release approach that how far you’re tracking would you be able to meet your delivery destination and delivery in the right model or not.

Sanjog Aul [00:33:38]:
Now, all of this that you did would require support from management for sure, but it looks very good in ivory tower or on a drawing board, an architectural blueprint but on the ground, the people is what matters. Who will make this all work starting from you drawing it all the way to seeing it in action. What shifts did you think or did you have to make or you had to seek support from your business unit leaders and from your IT group and from the executive management on the people side for this to come to fruition the way it did.

Praveen Moturu [00:34:18]:
Yes, I think people, we’ve been talking a lot about factor and process and methodology, but I think people are the most important in the complete equation here and when we talk about people, it’s not just people alone, but it’s the soft skills and the technical skills that they need to acquire and again, there’s no perfect situation where I can say all my team is perfect. There are, there needs to be a continuous education and continuous learning, unlearning and relearning kind of concept because some of these behaviors needs to be adaptive, some of these behaviors need to change and some of these skills need to be acquired on a continuous basis. It’s not that some artistics are doing great and they are the star players. They need continuous execution as well, that’s number one, number two is the leadership support is very critical.

Praveen Moturu [00:35:06]:
Like when we do this transformation. All my Chief Digital Office, all my leadership, including the Chief Digital Officer, along with the CIOs along with the CIO business partners, they are part and parcel in this initiative. It’s not that the EA mandate is driven by enterprise architecture organization. It is done as part of our Mars Digital Technologies and as part of MARS mandate that we engage, encourage and collaborate with enterprise architecture and we are part of it. I think that is the mindset we need to drive eventually. With that said, it requires a lot of patience, it requires a lot of learning, it requires a lot of coaching and facilitation skills from architects to be able to clearly articulate the value drivers and the alternatives and how do we engage each and every person across the enterprise with empathy.

Sanjog Aul [00:36:02]:
Now one question I would have about the management at what point were they willing to follow the EA group because you will have to lead right for this to be a EA centric transformation. What all did you have to do because they’re people too while they’re management, but they’re people too. How did you manage up to make sure they start seeing what you bring and they actually start following you so that EA becomes the digital catalyst and the driver for the whole transformation.

Praveen Moturu [00:36:40]:
Excellent question. So this is where I think where we can say the rubber meets the road. So first of all we have to earn the trust, as I said, and we have to earn it as a team and as stressed, I would strongly point out to the collaboration culture. So we are as team when we represent any direction, any decision, any strategy. We need to ensure all the top down, bottom up organizations are coming along with you as one team, that’s really critical. The second thing is, as I said, the outward in front, the industry trends, the industry drivers, you need to show that you are relevant, you are connected and you understand and you are bringing those outward in front into the enterprise by provoking, by thinking about art of possibility, by doing some scenario planning and experience map connections, you need to be able to take those trends. It’s a peer to peer industry connections

Praveen Moturu [00:37:36]:
or whether it’s partnership, taking a point of view from all your strategic technology partners or working with your integration partners, you need to be able to capture and connect these trends to the moments of your consumers of your business. Once these moments are connected, then you can drive the moment and that’s where you’re setting as a leadership residence, as a trusted advisor, as a trusted partner for both business and it to rely on you because they are one, they clearly understand you are the connecting point. Number two, they have the trust in you that you are engaging them and you’re making them part of your decision making and making them part and parcel of your success and lastly, mostly relevant is it’s a mutual investment on each other. It’s not that somebody is giving you or offering you a table at the chair, you earned it and you are part of this together and that’s the message as a one team that we need to drive.

Sanjog Aul [00:38:33]:
Now what you just said definitely would be awesome, where you would have built your credibility but when you get started and you propose this idea, what’s the typical uphill battle that is to be expected from the business management because you’re asking them to change their regular ways of working and thinking.

Praveen Moturu [00:38:54]:
Yes, I think we need to identify some opportunities. As I indicated, the application complexity and application racialization is an opportunity not a lot of people are focusing on, hey, how do we get rid of applications that we are not using. How do we get rationalized technologies which are redundant in enterprise and if you as a architecture team can look at the state of complexity and execute that in showing continuous results month over month, that will bring your trust. If there is a compliance or a governance issue that’s been there for a long time and there is a huge operational risk in terms of either systems not being able to be supported or security risks and you step in and you carry over and understand how do we resolve those to address those risks. That’s second opportunity and lastly, you identify what are the top priority projects or programs or products and help those to survive or succeed or turn around that’s the third kind of opportunities. So we need to identify these opportunities.

Praveen Moturu [00:40:03]:
Any enterprise will have similar challenges to earn that trust first and that is, it’s not that you start something and you fail, and you might fail in your first attempt, but you need to constantly look at these opportunities from industry trends or internal complexity or priorities or, or all these turnaround moments to earn the trust and once you have the trust and once people understand that you are committed and you are trying to stay relevant, it’s in their best interest to partner with you as you move forward and that’s the only secret for the structures.

Sanjog Aul [00:40:38]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back and Praveen, when we come back, let’s look at the partner ecosystem you will have to work together with because while enterprise architecture by design is supposed to look inward because it is enterprise architecture, but in the digital realm, you are not the only one who is going to touch the customer. So will your other partners and they have, you have to do it in a cohesive manner and a coordinated manner, that means they also should be stepping up and rethinking their own architecture and their workflows and processes for it to work for all parties involved

Sanjog Aul [00:41:15]:
but they may have different agenda, they may have different priorities. What did you do in that regard because otherwise you could fix your own fortress, but the other partners may not and they can become the weakest link and the customer suffers and you don’t achieve what you set out to do. What happened there? What were your trials and tribulations? What was the learning and what should people do if they are setting out using EA as a digital catalyst not only for the internal organization, but also to bring the partnership along. Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:42:47]:
Welcome back. So talking about partners Praveen, they may have different agenda, different budgets, different priorities and digital, for it to be successful, it requires that partner support which is outside of your enterprise. So did you get permission or did you take the opportunity of this transformation internally to also turn around the relationships you had with the other partners so they all came along with you in this journey and if yes, what was that magic formula you used?

Praveen Moturu [00:43:21]:
So I think I would classify the partnerships into two, one is the business partnership and the second one would be the technology partnerships and even in business partnerships you can talk about when you look at an enterprise, it’s about connecting several business areas as partners to collaborate and work on a common solution or a common problem versus connecting with business partners across the ecosystem. Where technology partners, again you can classify them as your strategic technology vendors that you rely on and then your integration partners or delivery partners who help you. So in both cases I think understanding again that trends is really key here because when we talk with partners who are integrating currently with us with EDI or some of the partners are ready to consume APIs, it can be one one and alone situation and there is a ramp up time for all partners to catch up and we need to be very clear because there’s a cost involved, there’s a readiness involved and there’s a process aspect involved in this. So our best approach we have taken would be to look at the industry trends and start offering a common capability that the partners would agree with us, in the situation where, especially in the business partnership side where we talk about technology partners, there’s obviously a lot of gaps and roadmap items or backlog type backlog items that we can work with the partners to drive innovation, to drive next generation of solutions and that’s very critical to have that partnerships with those technology partners, especially if you don’t have those technology partnerships, we are constrained with what the technology is offered at the table.

Praveen Moturu [00:45:09]:
To conclude this aspect, we are working very closely with our business partners both internally and also externally at the same time, working with our technology partners to help us drive this transformation more smoothly and efficiently.

Sanjog Aul [00:45:26]:
If you were to look at the EA and the way you’re trying to move this forward from the cultural perspective, we spoke about people, but those individual set of people you would work with who are closer to you or you would influence some of them but there has to be a fundamental culture which will be conducive for you to carry out this exercise and be successful. Did you have to prime the culture before you did it or culture became the outcome of this exercise? What happened with it?

Praveen Moturu [00:46:01]:
This is a unique situation for Mars because one of our five guiding principles is mutuality. So we truly knew by our guiding principles, and this is one of the best organizations I have seen in Fortune 500 that I have worked with that truly believes in these guiding principles, following each and every level. So the mutuality brings a win win situation for our partners in business, for our partners in technology. So as we are jointly investing in new avenues, jointly investing in new ventures and new ecosystems, we are looking at, as I clearly articulated, the value drivers that are more mutual and having those common goals with mutuality. I think that is one key aspect of bringing this collaborating successful partnerships.

Sanjog Aul [00:46:48]:
And so if I were to ask you about your position within the organization, I assume you refer to the CIO, do you?

Praveen Moturu [00:46:59]:
I refer to the Chief Digital Officer who all the CIOs report global CIOs report under and I’m one of the peers for the global CIOs along with several Vice Presidents for transformation.

Sanjog Aul [00:47:11]:
Okay, so the reason I asked this question, and thanks for so much for clarifying this, because in many cases EA actually ends up reporting to the IT organization and that prevents them from being able to step up because when you start reporting to business, that means IT is a business architecture versus a typical IT driven enterprise architecture. What should change in the way? Go ahead.

Praveen Moturu [00:47:38]:
No, sorry, go ahead.

Sanjog Aul [00:47:39]:
So the only thing which I wanted to understand is what kind of a reporting structure should it be for enterprise architecture to truly have the wherewithal, the freedom and what I call as the empowerment for them to drive digital. So you were rightly connected to the Chief Digital Officer and you had to still work through all of these different counterparts and IT was more of a peer to you but in many cases traditional EA is not there. So you’re saying the first step is that they should all pull out of the IT and get into the digital leadership because in many cases they don’t have a Chief Digital Officer. What do you do then.

Praveen Moturu [00:48:22]:
Great question. I will answer this question in two points. One the lines between business and IT are blurring and thanks to digital transformation and digital needs. The why I call it is we call ourselves no more IT, we call it ourselves as a digital technology organization and the reason why these lines are blurring between business and digital technologies and to start working as one team is this product mindset or looking at business capabilities and products and a shift in the way of thinking. Not in terms of projects and programs anymore, but it’s more product mindset with a product lifecycle management and adding features on the product which can help on a continuous increment and connect this end to end approach. So that’s a fundamental shift in how enterprises need to think in terms of a product organization where you have product architects, product owners and the whole nine yards of how do we how to create a product, serve a product, continuously improve a product and manage the lifecycle.

Praveen Moturu [00:49:23]:
So that is completely changing business versus IT. It’s one product team that’s accountable to drive the product. Now the role of EA becomes much more relevant because now you have several product teams and every product team is focused on their product and now you need to connect the dots across these products and connect the ecosystem together. So that’s why EA needs to be positioned and chartered to support both definition of the strategy along with the execution because that’s the execution is a critical part. Without execution your trust and value add and making the realization of a sustained business value is not getting met. So a lot of enterprises who are looking at architecture or enterprise architecture organizations, which is more relevant to address the digital transformation should be positioned to drive strategy along with execution so they can connect the dots between these product mindset and also ultimately align to the platforms.

Sanjog Aul [00:50:28]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, thanks so much Praveen for sharing your insights about how IT leaders and business leaders combine hands along with the enterprise architecture group to make sure that it becomes the very catalyst for digital success. Thanks so much again.

Praveen Moturu [00:50:45]:
Thank you Sanjog.

Sanjog Aul [00:50:47]:
And listeners hope you enjoyed it. I got a bunch of nuggets out of this. Please like us on Facebook, search for CTN and also be sure to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CTN. This is Sanjog Aul your talk show host. Till next week take care and god bless.