Horizon architecture: Business strategy activation

Why businesses need an architecture strategy

Technology is fundamental to how a company delivers on its strategy. There is little debate on that point today. In fact, 84% of respondents to Deloitte’s 2022 CSO Survey agreed that technology drives valuable organizational outcomes. Nearly 80% of respondents to Deloitte’s 2020 Global Technology Leadership Study have recently undertaken or intend to soon launch a technology-enabled transformation. And there’s more to this than executive intuition: Organizations whose technology choices and investments bolster their capacity for change and ability to win in the market see tangible returns.

Despite this overwhelming consensus on the strategic relevance of technology, however, our research has shown that the core function that connects enterprise strategy and technology strategy—that is, architecture—remains misunderstood and undervalued in most organizations. Architecture is only beginning to garner the necessary board and C-suite attention, meaning that well-crafted enterprise strategies remain at risk.

In this report, we explain why an organization’s most senior executives should dedicate greater mindshare to their enterprise architecture strategy and how they can help to shape a more sound, resilient, and competitively differentiating architecture.