Center for Enablement: Ecosystem Design Authority

This blog is an excerpt from the co-authored whitepaper, ‘Crafting your Future-Ready Enterprise AI Strategy’ aiming to support organizations on their journey in the Age of AI.

The final dimension in our Strategy and Vision pillar is organizational, putting in place the team or organizational unit required to drive our AI strategy forward. The Center for Enablement (CFE or C4E) concept is rather a departure from IT organizational concepts of old, though, representing a shift from controlling processes to enabling people.

Contrast it to the well-worn “center of excellence” that has historically focused on maintaining standards and enforcing compliance within various technology domains. A Center for Enablement, however, is dynamic: continuously evolving to adapt to new technologies and business needs. It moves beyond reactive governance to more proactively drive the organization’s executive vision for AI.

A well-rounded C4E will broadly focus on the following activities:    

• Strategic refresh ensuring that the organization’s AI strategy is continually re-evaluated and refreshed to reflect changes in the technology, business environment, and the performance of the organization’s portfolio of AI initiatives;

• Programmatic rigor, with the C4E taking responsibility for managing the portfolio of AI initiatives across the organization. This must include primary accountability for the achievement of milestones on the actionable roadmap, the development of key workloads, and the organization’s ongoing maturation across the entire AI Strategy Framework;

• Facilitate human connection, creating opportunities for colleagues to collaborate, innovate, and build communities of practice across the organization. This promotes collaboration, networking, brainstorming and building new skills in accordance with an ever-changing environment. The C4E must enable colleagues to succeed in their use of AI;

• Drive a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, encouraging a mindset of experimentation and learning, where insights are not just consumed but acted upon, iterated, and improved;

• Monitoring and metrics of the organization’s AI initiatives through advanced analytics and AI monitoring itself, identifying patterns and trends in a continuous loop to inform strategy. This must include continual assessment of the organization’s aggregate AI maturity using the AI Maturity Model (discussed in a later section). Learn more about this in the Monitoring and Metrics dimension in the Scaling AI pillar.

The Ecosystem Design Authority (EDA) offers a sound model through which the C4E can facilitate the success of the organization’s AI strategy across technical domains that it may not directly control. Think of the EDA as a collaborative, standing working group; “air traffic control” for the cloud, landing the workloads and technical services of different technology domains in the cloud ecosystem. The Ecosystem Design Authority (EDA) ensures that (a) architecture and technical decisions are aligned with the cloud and AI strategy, and (b) that workloads and technical services are assembled for the benefit of the whole ecosystem, not in service to a specific technical domain.

Figure 1: A notional Ecosystem Design Authority model, though note that the specific choice of technical domains should be tailored for the organization specifically.1

A few notes on the EDA model depicted above:

• ”Domains” segment technical disciplines within the ecosystem, and are fluid over time;

• Each domain is represented by one cloud solution architect or technical leader, regardless of the number of projects or work streams in the domain;

• Domains work together across ecosystem neighborhoods and the ecosystem at large;

• The executive leader is a CIO-level or direct report able to make decisions on behalf of the organization;

• The following are key roles within the Center for Enablement:

  • Cloud Strategist is “air traffic control” for the ecosystem, ensuring that technical services fit together and are aligned to strategic priorities;

  • Enterprise Architect oversees architecture and technical work on a day-to-day basis;

  • Program Manager is responsible for the non-technical programmatic rigor and execution of the AI strategy.

Here’s where a Center for Enablement becomes truly essential not just to the AI strategy but to the organization’s ecosystem more broadly, where the focus is building adaptable scalable cloud ecosystems that grow with the organization itself.