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Enterprise Architecture and Digital Leaders

A Survey Report Based on Research with McKinsey & Company and Sharm Manwani, Professor at Henley Business School

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Are you a Digital Leader? Best Practices for Enterprise Architecture

CEOs have seen “digital” disrupt industries over time and may consider it has reached maturity, even as COVID-19 accelerated its importance in their enterprises. Yet research from McKinsey and Henley Business School finds that going digital presents significant challenges. There is a pronounced performance gap between digital leaders and their peers. Hence CEOs should ask their executive teams: “Are we a digital leader and if not, why not?”

The survey report analyzes data from more than 300 enterprises and 50,000 data points to review the practices and outcomes for digital leaders of large enterprises. It shows that, in contrast to digital natives, striving for customer agility often leads to costly and inflexible IT interfaces and services. This IT complexity then results in an agility reduction paradox due to increasing technical debt. The survey quantifies the impact as being highly significant, and it explores how digital leaders are using Enterprise Architecture (EA) to address these issues.

Read the full report here

Professor Sharm Manwani

 Executive Professor of IT and Digital Leadership
Professor Sharm Manwani
Published 30 September 2021
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