Welcome to the AGPIAL audiobook production of

McKinsey Digital's.

How enterprise architects need to evolve to survive in a digital world.

Enterprise architects still have an important role to play at large incumbents, but they need to evolve in three ways.

by Oliver Bossert and Niels van der Wildt

If you like this type of content please like and subscribe.

Thank you.

Many CIOs at large incumbents have made a startling discovery about digital natives: those businesses often don’t have architects or at least anyone with the formal title of “enterprise architect.” 

With CIOs increasingly moving their organizations to an agile DevOps operating model, that discovery has prompted much questioning about whether they still need architects, and if so, what they should be doing.

While incumbents can learn plenty from digital natives and adopt many of their practices, eliminating the architect role shouldn’t be one of them.

That’s because digital natives have the benefits of a highly skilled and experienced workforce operating in a start-up culture on a modern architecture with few legacy issues.

Development teams in most incumbent organizations, however, don’t enjoy those benefits.

They are used to workarounds such as creating direct point-to-point connections because, for decades, that’s been the only way to get things done.

The reality is that most organizations still need architects.