What you expect to change often stays the same, while the things you’re sure about suddenly shift as Kristo Vaher, Digital Nation’s Director of Technology remarks on enterprise architecture. Last week he shared some insights into enterprise architecture with digital government leaders from Kenya. Kristo has worked as a digital solutions and software architect for most of his career, and continues to find that this field evolves in subtle and surprising ways.

Here are some of his key insights on unlocking enterprise architecture in 2025:
1. You need architects who act as elevators in your organization - and you need to empower them. The people who can move between layers - business, data, applications, and infrastructure - and help align business goals across the enterprise.
2. Sustainable architecture means building systems that last longer before they're labelled "legacy.” As enterprises add more services, they often hit a tipping point where maintaining existing systems dominates over innovating new ones. Your architects need to design systems that are change-tolerant.
3. TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) can be useful - if you pick the right parts. It’s a heavy framework and not always the right fit in full. But if there’s one part he’d highlight, it’s gap analysis. Define the scope and criteria for the change you want, understand your baseline ("as-is") architecture, define your target ("to-be") architecture, then identify the gaps in between.

The CHAOS Report by the Standish Group once pointed out that only about 6% of large projects succeed. If your project feels too big, it probably is. Don’t roll the dice - Break it down. If you’d like to have a conversation around enterprise architecture and how to build it, then get in touch and let’s dive deeper into the intricacies of it all.