Modernising EAM with Digital Twinning
In the Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) landscape, traditional tools often relied on manually crafted models that were cumbersome and less adaptive to the rapid pace of digital transformation.
The next generation of such tools offers an intuitive, visually appealing, cost-effective Business and Enterprise Architecture Management service that shifts the paradigm toward comprehensive digital management.
Some may argue that the term “digital twin” is more appropriate than EAM, as the word digital combines the intersection of business with IT, and the word twin emphasises the focus on a copy of real-world business operations.
A digital twin can be considered a digital representation of an organisation that captures its current state, including critical functions, capabilities, business processes, systems, and technologies with democratised governance. The governance is very important, as it allows more people to contribute with knowledge and information to secure a better understanding of the connectedness of the digital representation. This resolves two objectives, a better knowledge base as a single source of truth for capturing information, and a digital model that allows properties and calculations to use the most current information.
This approach aligns with Gartner’s concept of a Business Operations System (BOS), offering an online model that is continuously updated by people across the organisation and becomes more accurate over time due to the many input. It acts as a central knowledge base and management tool for enterprise assets and related strategy and architecture.
A BOS is the digital representation of the entire organisation, offering a digital model to observe and manage the business, but in a digital form with updated parameters, so the digital twin is easier to use for calculations, predictions, and helping to outline the targets of various ratios and performance metrics.
We can offer you, Next-Insight, the innovative choice of a modern solution, helping organisations to gain:
- A Digital Model of Business and IT Landscape: By mirroring the business’s structure and operations digitally, Next-Insight enables a clear model of the enterprise from goals to processes and technologies. The many relationships guide the understanding of how things impact each other.
- Optimisation and Risk Management: The tool assists in risk-assessing key functions and assets helping with compliance and facilitating better handling of cyber/IT-related risks across systems, platforms, technologies, and suppliers. This relates closely to new European requirements.
- Enterprise Alignment: It connects business capabilities, value streams, and strategic initiatives, ensuring that decision-makers have an integrated view of how changes can affect the broader organisation.
While legacy tools may cater to more classical perspectives of EA that focus solely on modeling and notation, our focus is to help customers gain insight and impact from digital management, Next-Insight embodies the shift towards digital management for everyone within your organisation; simply as a digital twinning providing business leaders with a focus on:
- Managing Digital Assets and Knowledge: Offering an online knowledge base to document, manage, and update the business architecture, the systems portfolio view, the coupling into value streams and critical functions, etc.
- Supporting Enterprise Goals: Providing an online decision-support solution that ties business and IT closely together, supporting transformation and optimisation efforts with a clear, data-driven model.
Our choice of offering Next-Insight’s modern take on digital management shifts the concept to a critical, holistic approach to business and digital alignment.
By using a digital twin methodology, organisations can map their “as-is” state, align strategic plans, and maintain principles for ongoing transformation efforts, thereby becoming a simple-to-use enabler for digital management, bridging business and IT to foster collaboration, informed decision-making, and sustainable growth. It positions EAM as a strategic, value-driven discipline that integrates the management of both business capabilities and technology within a single, unified web solution.
While many vendors may rush to provide early solutions, our approach involves assessing, designing, and several smaller sprints to quickly identify quick wins at the intersection of enterprise architecture, risk management, and digital governance.
Let’s connect if you require assistance in converting from a low-maturity into a future-oriented data-driven architecture practice. Book your advisory session here.
