“Architectures of the future will have to enable decision-making in light of corporate performance and conformance and unconditional agility.

Beyond its role of capturing and decomposing organizational and technological complexity, future architectures need to integrate strategic and financial elements. Strategy and finance are already modeled, but in different ‘architectures’. Only a tighter integration, however, will allow ‘make-or-buy-decisions’ based on ‘strategy-aware architectures’. Even more interesting, a ‘sell-option’ emerges when architectures will be designed based on loosely-coupled services. Then, organizations will commercialize ‘pockets of excellence’ from its portfolio of services.

Future architectures will be characterized by integration with the environment to facilitate corporate agility. This will require an improved understanding of how external changes impact the architecture. New internal and external stakeholders responsible for risk, governance and compliance (GRC) will become customers of future architectures. This will require a closer integration of current and emerging standards and reference frameworks. Future architectures also need to be ‘risk-aware’, i.e. they need to support organization-wide assessments of the risk exposure.

Future architectures that are strategy, risk and context aware will be much richer than many of the current architectures.”