Holistic approach to sustainable transformation.

The Role Of Enterprise Architecture

It’s not an easy task to establish systems that enable information to flow in the right way, to be made available in a timely manner and without boundaries, but it is one with a well-established toolkit around it. For years, the discipline of Enterprise Architecture has grown and developed to solve exactly this kind of problem: looking at technology and business practices as a holistic environment, it brings rigorous processes which enable more efficient, resilient, and innovative ways of working.

As organizations have sought to balance the transformation imperative with the need to sustain existing areas of value, the role of Enterprise Architecture has grown in significance. Ensuring that new products, services, or methods integrate well with established offerings – and, indeed, ensuring that those two aspects mutually support one another’s value – is something that Enterprise Architecture fundamentally enables.

In the future, businesses that want to commit sincerely to sustainability will need to repeat that move with these new information flows. With sustainability being an echo of digitalization as a transformation imperative, reexamining and rearchitecting the fundamentals of daily workflows is critical.

A Holistic Pproach

Businesses are also investing significantly into revenue maintenance, workforce management, regulatory compliance, and informationdriven processes. This is to ensure that the relevant information is well-founded, well-stored, and well-shared.

A significant difference with sustainability is that the nature of the information it needs to work with is still an emerging factor. With something as obvious as CO2 production, different businesses or processes within an organization could use various: units to record that data; ways of describing how that data was recorded and with what level of confidence; definitions for what constitutes direct or indirect emissions; and field names and file formats for storing and sharing that data in. All of this makes a broad, accurate view of a given organization’s footprint very difficult to attain, and the problem is multiplied when we add other greenhouse gases like CH4 and

NO2 alongside impacts like water and land consumption. The role of the Open Footprint Forum, a forum of The Open Group, is solving this challenge, making a holistic, Enterprise Architecturebased approach to sustainability possible. The prospect of gathering emissions data for scopes 1, 2, and 3 reporting is daunting in the context of typical value chains found in businesses, and the outputs and standards coming from the forum will greatly ease these issues.

The Open Footprint Forum will allow organizations to move at speed to develop applications which make effective usage of their sustainability data through its reference architecture and help to deliver interoperability across the emissions ecosystem. The Forum, comprising a range of corporate and academic contributors, is developing a set of standards which is usable across all industries, with unified data and metadata definitions as well as open source data tools and reference APIs to ensure a common approach to working with those definitions.

Ea At The Center

One thing we know, from years of incubating standards development processes, is that cultural norms and usage is just as important as technical design when it comes to effectiveness.

We found recently in hosting business scenario sessions in Edinburgh and São Paulo that issues around operating models, such as supply chain integration and stakeholder incentivization, are just as important of a concern as data issues like validating and exchanging information.

We learnt here that as we progress towards a standard for sustainability data that every industry can hold in common, we will need to increase our understanding of the organizational complexities around using it. It is now the prime opportunity for Enterprise Architecture to start building and sharing the systems and processes which can put sustainability right at the center of effective decision making.