Skills for Sustainable Enterprise Architectures in a VUCA World

Abstract

Our understanding of enterprise architecture (EA) is evolving from EA as a way to align business and information technology to EA as enabler of organizational innovation and sustainability. This perspective fits the new realities of today’s global business environment, which can be describedthrough the acronym VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity). In a VUCA world, it is extremely important to create EAs that are sustainable, i.e. that can last a long time and evolve in response to internal and external changes. The new VUCA world and the need for sustainable yet agile EAs create new requirements for EA skills that will be valuable in the future. In this paper, we present an exploratory conceptual study of VUCA characteristics and skills in the context of sustainable EA. Our contributions are the new conceptualization of the skills and of the approaches that enterprise architects can use to develop these new skills.