We recently asked Daniel Hutley, The Open Group Architecture Forum Director, about the potential of a global recession and the impact it could have on companies and their approach to technology.
Question: If there is a global, economic downturn in 2023, how do you expect companies to react?
Answer: While the forward economic view might be challenging going into 2023, it should be clear that one area which businesses will not deprioritize is innovation. Seeking improved customer experiences, inventing new business models, and architecting highly automated processes will be vital to deliver the efficiency savings and new growth that businesses will need to survive.
Q: Can you elaborate?
A: That should put Agile at the forefront of organizations’ system thinking: there has been a real swell in Agile adoption in recent years, and the methodology continues to prove itself as an unequalled engine for innovation. However, as enterprises adopt it even more widely, they will also encounter challenge points around ensuring that Agile teams achieve outputs that are mutually complementary – and which don’t imperil the enormous embedded value of legacy systems.
Q: Can agile be applied across the whole enterprise?
A: I do see a shift happening in the near future in which Agile comes to be thought of on the scale of the whole business, not just on the scale of individual teams. It will become increasingly clear that attempts to coordinate Agile operations on an ad hoc basis lead to unmanageable, exploding complexity. The solution will be to formally coordinate from the ground up on the basis of Agile, with standards such as The Open Group Open Agile Architecture™ (O-AA) Standard providing the framework for a methodology which encompasses business decisions as much as it does technology decisions.
In a tough economic climate, businesses will not be able to afford the gamble of misaligned innovation. That means that the formalizing power of Enterprise Architecture has never been more important.