The 2020 Enterprise Architecture Awards
2. Adopting modern technology platforms and application architecture. The EA team played a key role in understanding modern/emerging technology platforms, analyzing the applicability of these technologies to business needs, and defining standards and playbooks for implementation. In the last 12 months, the EA team has also launched the following centers of excellence (CoE) in collaboration with cross-functional execution teams: a robotics process automation (RPA) CoE and an enterprise integration platform CoE.
The 2020 Enterprise Architecture Awards
The EA team then designed initiatives to support the execution of its plans. It implemented a system of enterprise standards to provide a consistent, flexible, and redundant infrastructure comprising storage, server/desktop virtualization, and core networking. By the end of Phase I, the new EHR was in use across 61 proprietary software applications and nearly five dozen third-party solutions and products. The EHR was also launched at inpatient locations and in the public-facing MyChart portal, which has grown to over 300,000 MyChart registrations and has been instrumental in addressing the COVID-19 challenge in 2020.
Headquartered in New York City, Verizon Communications offers voice, data, and video services and solutions. On April 1, 2019, the Verizon 2.0 operating model brought in a new era of refocusing efforts around its core network, restructuring customer-facing units, and focusing on 5G and iEN deployment. This underscored the importance of an enterprisewide architecture team and a well-architected systems landscape. In 2020, after the EA team gained maturity and trust across the organization, it evolved its original framework to focus on the following four areas:
Architecture governance. EAs are aligned with the different lines of businesses and are embedded into major initiatives to help guide the technology and architectural decisions. This provided them visibility into major initiatives across the enterprise and allowed them to exploit synergies across those initiatives. They created an architecture community of practice, made up of enterprise architects, solution architects, and technical leads, to develop and approve technology standards, design patterns, and best practices. They are also an active partner in governing and shaping the strategic technology programs around cloud, platform modernization, DevOps, data and analytics, cybersecurity, and ITSM.
Data enablement platform. The digital enablement platform (DEP) is one of the key components of EIRA. The DEP plays an important role in personalizing digital interactions, simplifying operations, and optimizing cost. The main focus areas are adoption of open source, enterprise-grade commodity hardware, increased use of analytics and data-driven decision-making, and the use of analytics for customer experience, service operations, automation, campaigns, and operational excellence. The EA team established data architecture principles for the data architecture environments across NatCOs.
In order to support agile, a transformation matrix structure was put in place. A chief stream (tribe) architect role was introduced that has a reporting line to the enterprise architect of the correspondent business line as well as to the stream/tribe lead. Stream architects in their turn supervise detailed design (solution architecture), which is built by team architects.
The new EA organization consists of about 200 architects and 160 stream architects working in streams but having matrix reporting lines to the enterprise architects of the correspondent business lines. Solution architects usually are nominated from the dev, and the current community consists of 500+ specialists. This new EA structure allows for running architecture and development processes for over 1,200 teams or over 10,000 developers.
Cloud-native transformation. EA is a key driver of transforming the legacy landscape into a cloud-native microservices architecture. In 2020, VTB began the transformation of the legacy applications portfolio. The core of this transformation lies in the creation of a new omnichannel banking platform. From the EA perspective, this new platform meant a new UI/UX design ops approach, new architecture standards, a new technology stack, new cybersecurity standards, and new microservices architecture principles and patterns.
As a result, the new cloud-native architecture of VTB helped make a 10x improvement for time-to-market for the new product and significantly reduced the cost of releasing the new product into the market. In this architecture in 2020 and the first half of 2021, VTB successfully launched into production a new omnichannel platform for retail and SMB clients, digital credit for corporates, a credit conveyor for retail, mobile banking for retail, and an online bank for corporates.
André Christ, CEO and Co-Founder of LeanIX, had this to say about the company's growth: "The high growth rate reflects three important factors for LeanIX: (1) More and more organizations rely on LeanIX to get ready for continuous transformation - a key capability in the digital age; (2) enterprise architecture is no longer a niche topic, but at top of the list of decision makers; and (3) the strong growth enables us to heavily invest in customer centricity and innovation..."
LeanIX is continuously developing new and innovative ways to manage enterprise architecture landscapes. From clearer diagrams to data-driven decisions, our enterprise architecture tool gives users real-time overviews of their IT environments and business capabilities to accelerate productivity. Our platform assists with Application Portfolio Management, Technology Risk Management, Business Transformation Management, and more.
The value of their collaborative enterprise architecture program enables near-live business resilience reporting, solves business issues through visibility and communication and reports on the real-time impact of Covid on critical teams and activities.
On joining Stanford Health Care in early 2020, Anurang Revri (Chief Enterprise Architect) immediately assessed the current enterprise architecture maturity, created an enterprise architecture roadmap, consolidated the enterprise architecture and Solution Architecture teams bringing the total to 7 architects (1 Chief Enterprise Architect, 1 Enterprise Architect, 1 Solution Architect Manager, and 4 Solution Architects) to make the Enterprise Architecture program a more strategic organizational function.
The creation of their Enterprise Architecture Centre of Excellence has helped to accelerate enterprise-wide transformation. Furthermore, their enterprise architecture program has sparked collaboration across domains providing insights into their portfolio, helping to qualify decision-making as well as resolve demarcation of application ownership and to meet regulatory requirements.
I am starting to see a great deal of changes in the industry to solidify this more. We see examples of this everyday with universities support, firmer standards, maturing enterprise architecture functions and a wealth of support from practitioners in communities like LinkedIn and others alike. To credit the discipline a little bit, for such a robust and complex as EA it is no doubt why it has taken so long.
On December 4th, 2019, the United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) awarded a contract to UNCOMN, LLC to provide enterprise architecture, data, and engineering services to USTRANSCOM, US Air Force Air Mobility Command (AMC), and US Army Surface Deployment Distribution Command (SDDC). This indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract will last for five years with an estimated value over $175,000,000. Contract execution is expected to commence in April 2020.
Under the firm fixed price and labor hour contract, UNCOMN will develop and deliver enterprise architecture products, capability prototypes, system plans, enterprise cloud services, cybersecurity solutions, and data management services; as well as provide enterprise architecture tool operations support for service offerings across USTRANSCOM and its Transportation Component Commands. As the command transitions into commercial cloud services and future capabilities, UNCOMN will support integration efforts to perform analysis across enterprise, systems of systems, and individual system levels as well as assist the Government in developing enterprise strategies, technical standards, and services.
Leading organizations use enterprise architecture frameworks as guides and inspiration on the types of deliverables they might create. EA is a discipline that is continuing to evolve investment deliverables.
The year 2020 was a difficult one and unlike any other for businesses and organizations around the world. Fortunately, while the challenges presented by COVID-19 were numerous, many data storage vendors rose to the occasion with standout enterprise storage systems, software and services.
This is quite a notable achievement by these three vendors, but it shouldn't take away from the other competition victors. Explore all the 2020 gold, silver and bronze enterprise storage systems and products winners below, as well as an impressive startup that didn't make the podium but garnered our second annual Judges' Choice award.
The pandemic accelerated the adoption of cloud storage in 2020, perhaps more than any other storage Products of the Year category. This year's winners address three areas -- cloud-native application management, cloud NAS and hosted cloud -- of using the cloud as a storage tool. The diversity among the winners reflects enterprises' growing comfort with storing data in the cloud as they re-evaluate their IT infrastructures at a time when working from home has become the norm.
Medalists in the disk and disk subsystems category demonstrate how integral flash has become to enterprise storage systems and arrays. As solid-state prices continue to fall, it has become easier for both large and -- increasingly -- midsize organizations to replace disk-based storage with flash media. This category includes the second of three repeat gold winners for storage Products of the Year 2020, as well as a new midrange array and the addition of NVMe-over-TCP flash fabric to the hybrid architecture of an enterprise storage system. 041b061a72