Enterprise Architecture — Federated Approach

by Krishnan Venkatasubramanian

Overview

In the era of digital technology and its nature of ubiquitousness across industries has paved way for new inventions in business models, customer experience and ultimate effects on organizations revenues, opportunities and profits. MediaMarktSaturn (MMS) Retail is no exception to this theory and has embraced digitization advancements. As the largest consumer electronic retail organization in Europe spanning 13 countries, MMS group is focused to integrate between its digital and physical properties and provide Omni-Channel Experience (OMX) for its customers with channel-agnostic approach.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an important pillar in MMS Technology in representing its strategy, its organization as well as its IT Landscape including applications integration. EA provides holistic structure of MMS, including all its Domain related information, applications, services and their relationships to each other. Furthermore EA provides knowledge on Enterprise systems, Cross-Enterprise perspective, insights on new technologies, understanding relationship between business strategies and ability to manage organizations short- and long-term objectives.

MMS historically had independent locality setup consists of having different technology stacks, different applications stacks, different implementation approaches, multiple redundancies across customer channels per country. As MMS started its technological transformation journey towards “ONE Platform” a few years ago, which demanded all the geographic entities of MMS to agree on single vision and transition of their stacks.

To achieve this transformation, any organization should have clear plan & architecture. EA as a central unit plays a significant role in gathering the information from geographic entities and arriving to a central architecture. “Federated Architecture” (FA) approach is a tailor made for the above mentioned challenges and bringing together a bi-directional approach between central Technology EA & geographic specific Country Architecture (CA). This blog will cover about how EA was successful in implementing the FA approach hence providing transparent sustainable architectures for MMS.

Federated Architecture — Approach

The geographic entities from the countries were independently managing the architecture with their local applications, operating on their local strategies which had some major flaws like no common business/technology directives, architecture principles and lack of standards & processes. In comparison, the central driven architecture will also have flaws like strategic directions one way from center, less autonomy for countries, centralized decision making etc. To balance these flaws between geographic entities and centralized control, EA team introduce ‘Federated Architecture’ (FA) approach.

FA works on the principle: Strategic directions comes from central technology, but the countries & central EA decide to bridge strategic directions & Architecture design. Countries & central EA agree on common standards, terminologies, design & processes. FA ensures the decision drivers have countries / geographic interests & directions hence providing sustainable architecture to the group & country specific initiatives. In addition FA approach ensures that many Business Values are derived which includes understanding your local customers, understanding on the common outcome, faster time to market in geographies, managing and governance of central architecture, better understanding of local applications and synergies with central enterprise applications stack. The degree of central control is depicted in the diagram below which denotes the extremity of both centralized and decentralized way of working and how federated approach solves this extremity and brings balance.

Figure 1: Degree of Architecture Control

Federated Architecture — Guiding Principles

Key principles for EA and CA collaboration are as follows:

1. One Architecture Community & Collaboration among all geographic entities.
2. Bridge between local geographic stakeholders & central technology unit (MMST).
3. Align on local demand & priorities with global architecture & domain blueprints.
4. Co-creating the architecture best practices, principles, skills to develop state of the art and sustainable architectures.
5. Own a common architecture & engineering process for local geographic teams & central technology teams.
6. Fostering innovation mindset on local geographies and evaluate relevant new technologies leveraging the knowledge from central architecture team.

Federated Architecture — Working Model

It was decided together with EA, Country IT Managers & Technology Management team to introduce a role of ‘Country Enterprise Architect’ (CEA) as part of FA journey. The key responsibilities of a CEA are as follows:

1. Responsible for AS-IS and TO-BE Architecture of local geographies. Align local architecture & design with group enterprise architects.
2. Responsible for Architecture governance processes & principles.
3. Communicate to key (country) stakeholders on the objectives & architecture approach of the initiatives.
4. Guide the local business and tech initiatives to dependencies in the group product organization
5. Work with central architecture team and articulate the principles of architecture to get buy-in from local territories.
6. Co-creating the best practices, principles, skills to develop state of the art and sustainable enterprise architecture.
7. Support the Technology teams on the transformation of IT stacks (local) to common blue-print architecture.
8. Work closely with central enterprise architects to align on business objects and capabilities of the domains and impacts on local geographies.
9. Align globally on the architecture dependencies on domains / products and their impacts on their respective geographies.

The CEA reports to local country IT Manager and reports functionally to MMS Head of EA (HOEA). Cluster of CEAs from different geographic regions (representing one or more countries) report to HOEA to provide above mentioned services. Current plan of CEAs is split across EU regional clusters where MMS operates. Figure 2 depicts how regional clusters are connected with central EA and also the business value CEAs are providing to the organization.

Figure 2: CEAs — Regional Cluster split

Conclusion

It has been challenging the last few years for all industries and in particular Retail due to pandemic / supply chain challenges / macro-economic problems / geo-political issues surrounding Europe etc. One of the key challenge faced in EA in an organization like MMS during these turbulent times was to sell the value of Architecture to its key stakeholders and help educate them on the full scope of EA. As a multinational organization, MMS must optimize its technology stack / architecture & (Re-)innovate on new ways of working with all its operational entities. Federated Architecture (FA) has been one such measures to tackle the above-mentioned challenges, which has been seeded during the Year 2022 and now organizations from different geographies are reaping positive benefits from it. Furthermore it has created transparency in the local country organization on their application inventory, applications integrations & very significantly on application transitions towards central architecture paradigm, architecture related governance etc. And from local country organization, it has created responsibilities on the architectures (‘AS-IS’ & ‘TO-BE’).In conclusion FA approach to Enterprise Architecture will foster growth, ensure compliance and reduces complexity for any organization.

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