January 31, 2023

More Than Ever, It’s About Your Business Ecosystem

During today’s research meeting, we were discussing ChatGPT, and how organizations are using it today. It’s interesting because even though OpenAI is saying that ChatGPT is “beta,” there are several industries where organizations are using ChatGPT as if it’s an enterprise tool.

Interestingly one of those industries is the real estate industry. I recently read an article about the use of ChatGPT in real-estate offices, and the fact that some agents say they can’t do their job without it.

With ChatGPT, a real estate agent can enter an address and ask for two or three paragraphs description of that property. What they get back is a nicely written high-level description of the area and the property.

The results from ChatGPT aren’t detailed or completely correct. However, for a busy real-estate person, who may not be the strongest writer, it is a great start.

Generative Content Is Becoming Mainstream…What Do You Do?

If you really want to know about generative content, I suggest you read some of my colleague Adam Pease’s research, or even better schedule an inquiry with him. He knows this topic and has written extensively about it.

But what was interesting to me, is that when I tried to use ChatGPT recently I got the “ChatGPT is at capacity right now. Get notified when we’re back.”

The issue is that small, medium, and large businesses are using these cloud-based services, to get their work done. And to the point that they are becoming essential if not critical.

Now, the IT team may not view them as critical, but if you are trying to sell property, create a lesson plan, develop product marketing materials or, even, creating a research paper they are pretty critical.

But what do you do if your “business” critical tools are not under your management? Design your business ecosystem.

Architecting Your Business Ecosystem

IT leaders and enterprise architects must realize that their role has already expanded beyond your business enterprise to your business ecosystem. Your business ecosystem includes your close partners, customers, and suppliers.

Your business ecosystem will also include your critical “enterprise’ applications, such as ERP, supply chain, customer engagement, integration platform, all of which are increasingly being supported primarily in the cloud.

Therefore, whichever cloud platforms and services are important to your applications become part of your business ecosystem.

What we are learning now is that even small applications and apps can become critical to your business and they therefore are part of your business ecosystem.

As these ecosystem-based services become more important to your business, it’s critical to ask what sort of security, reliability, availability, and extensibility they deliver.

Are hackers able to use business services to infect your systems. If your business users become dependent upon a service what happens when it’s unavailable? Furthermore, are your users getting locked into a solution that you can’t use in any other way?

Bottom Line

I’ve been in this industry long enough to see the change from IT being able to control and manage technology resources, to today where users and business leaders are driving the adoption and use of technology and services.

The hard truth for IT leaders and architects is that you cannot simply ignore or negate this usage. If your users and business leaders are finding a service valuable or critical you cannot simply close your eyes to the benefits and risks associated with them.

You must start including the ecosystem of products, technologies and services within your planning and management – including ChatGPT.

Every security plan must include the ecosystem services, technologies and information that your business users are leveraging. Your architecture plans, future-state and current-state, must include your ecosystem of businesses, information, processes and technologies.

Business ecosystem does not mean that you need to approve/encourage the use of all technologies and tools.

However, your role as IT leaders and as architects is to help communicate to management and to users the value, costs and benefits of any technology. And to help set the expectations of business leaders and users correctly as to how they can use a service effectively and securely.

Catch Betsy LIVE on Wednesday, February 22, 2023 at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET!

Enterprise architecture (EA) has emerged as a critical discipline to help enterprises align their assets with their business strategy.

The discipline of EA is focused on bridging the gap between strategy and execution by delivering business outcome-focused roadmaps, models, and frameworks that enable balanced and informed investment decisions.

On Wednesday, February 22, 2023, Betsy Burton will discuss EA in 2023 and four major trends significantly impacting how organizations will need to support EA going forward.

What is the role of EA and business architecture in 2023?
What trends are impacting EA in 2023?
How do organizations evolve their EA efforts to support their business?

This blog on “Business Ecosystems” is part of the Business Transformation blog series by Aragon Research’s VP of Research, Betsy Burton.

More Than Ever, It’s About Your Business Ecosystem