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3 Enterprise Architecture Trends to Watch for in 2023

Wilko Visser
ValueBlue

Digital transformation was a universal theme in 2022. As we track changes in the enterprise architecture landscape, we observe trends that we believe will shape EA in 2023. Here are our predictions for the coming year:

The role of the enterprise architect will change

Enterprise architects will become essential members of the organization. Companies embrace business transformation because they want to become digital natives, therefore application landscapes are becoming more complicated.

Additionally, the number of transformation projects and digital initiatives is growing, and enterprise architects are needed to keep track of the current infrastructure, design future-state solutions, and manage transformation projects. Without an Enterprise Architect in place to oversee these initiatives, transformation projects risk running over time and budget without producing any benefits to the organization.

Technology ambassadors will drive agile maturity

Agile maturity is an essential component of digital transformation. Our 2022 Agile Business Transformation Benchmarking Report showed that the greater the agile maturity of a company, the more effective the business transformation projects across the entire operation. However, agile maturity needs to span the whole company. Every department needs to improve its agile maturity to keep pace with market changes, opportunities, and threats, which is why technology ambassadors within the organization are becoming crucial.

The technology ambassador or business technologist will become a pivotal role in the company. Technology ambassadors work outside the IT department but do technology work to drive new business capabilities. For example, analytics architects support the marketing department. These technology ambassadors will drive agile maturity within their departments, making their departments more adaptable to change.

Transformation is everyone's concern

Transformation tools will be part of every aspect of the business. Three factors are driving the spread of digital transformation tools:

1. The move toward digitally native operations.

2. The increase in the need for business technologists outside of IT.

3. The need for more digital transformation initiatives.

In 2023 you can expect to see more collaboration and data democratization. Siloed enterprise architecture initiatives are a thing of the past. Every new digital project will have a company-wide impact. Having a transformation tool that allows all parts of the business to collaborate and have visibility into the future state is a must going into the new year.

Wilko Visser is the CEO at ValueBlue

The Latest

A new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value reveals that enterprises are expected to significantly scale AI-enabled workflows, many driven by agentic AI, relying on them for improved decision making and automation. The AI Projects to Profits study revealed that respondents expect AI-enabled workflows to grow from 3% today to 25% by the end of 2025. With 70% of surveyed executives indicating that agentic AI is important to their organization's future, the research suggests that many organizations are actively encouraging experimentation ...

Respondents predict that agentic AI will play an increasingly prominent role in their interactions with technology vendors over the coming years and are positive about the benefits it will bring, according to The Race to an Agentic Future: How Agentic AI Will Transform Customer Experience, a report from Cisco ...

A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

3 Enterprise Architecture Trends to Watch for in 2023

Wilko Visser
ValueBlue

Digital transformation was a universal theme in 2022. As we track changes in the enterprise architecture landscape, we observe trends that we believe will shape EA in 2023. Here are our predictions for the coming year:

The role of the enterprise architect will change

Enterprise architects will become essential members of the organization. Companies embrace business transformation because they want to become digital natives, therefore application landscapes are becoming more complicated.

Additionally, the number of transformation projects and digital initiatives is growing, and enterprise architects are needed to keep track of the current infrastructure, design future-state solutions, and manage transformation projects. Without an Enterprise Architect in place to oversee these initiatives, transformation projects risk running over time and budget without producing any benefits to the organization.

Technology ambassadors will drive agile maturity

Agile maturity is an essential component of digital transformation. Our 2022 Agile Business Transformation Benchmarking Report showed that the greater the agile maturity of a company, the more effective the business transformation projects across the entire operation. However, agile maturity needs to span the whole company. Every department needs to improve its agile maturity to keep pace with market changes, opportunities, and threats, which is why technology ambassadors within the organization are becoming crucial.

The technology ambassador or business technologist will become a pivotal role in the company. Technology ambassadors work outside the IT department but do technology work to drive new business capabilities. For example, analytics architects support the marketing department. These technology ambassadors will drive agile maturity within their departments, making their departments more adaptable to change.

Transformation is everyone's concern

Transformation tools will be part of every aspect of the business. Three factors are driving the spread of digital transformation tools:

1. The move toward digitally native operations.

2. The increase in the need for business technologists outside of IT.

3. The need for more digital transformation initiatives.

In 2023 you can expect to see more collaboration and data democratization. Siloed enterprise architecture initiatives are a thing of the past. Every new digital project will have a company-wide impact. Having a transformation tool that allows all parts of the business to collaborate and have visibility into the future state is a must going into the new year.

Wilko Visser is the CEO at ValueBlue

The Latest

A new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value reveals that enterprises are expected to significantly scale AI-enabled workflows, many driven by agentic AI, relying on them for improved decision making and automation. The AI Projects to Profits study revealed that respondents expect AI-enabled workflows to grow from 3% today to 25% by the end of 2025. With 70% of surveyed executives indicating that agentic AI is important to their organization's future, the research suggests that many organizations are actively encouraging experimentation ...

Respondents predict that agentic AI will play an increasingly prominent role in their interactions with technology vendors over the coming years and are positive about the benefits it will bring, according to The Race to an Agentic Future: How Agentic AI Will Transform Customer Experience, a report from Cisco ...

A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...