Building Digital Ecosystem Architectures

This book aims to provide a practitioner’s perspective of what it is like to develop the next generation of information technology (IT) solutions that will computerize corporate enterprises.

The pervasive adoption of digital technologies across all industries is a global phenomenon. Materially, the internet economy, which represents online transactional data, may only represent 10 percent of the Gross Domestic Product of countries but per annum this is growing at 8 to 10 percent, far outpacing growth in traditional physical “bricks and mortar” sectors defined as physical goods and services that are traded off-internet.¹ Viewing internet transactions is only part of the wider evolution of how human activity is using digital technology in all manner of social and business activity. Technology frequently enables activities in an augmented way, adding more value to telephone conversations, email, searching for information, or completing a document, taking a photograph, or listening to music. There is a greater than tenfold growth forecast in the next decade for mobile and data traffic alone, and there is a commensurate forecast in the rise of the “Internet of Things.” Technological ecosystems are emerging that are becoming fused into the very fabric of society and economies, and these are creating network effects that pervade the digital economy. Online presence through websites and, increasingly, mobile devices has become highly interconnected, forming ecosystems of association and technologies.

In our everyday lives we seek out meaning in the communication and interactions we have, with little thought as to how this works. Yet to a computer the act of natural language processing and ‘speaking’ is a highly complex and difficult task. The subtle nuances of a facial expression, the tone of a human voice, the use of body language in the gesture of a hand or a touch is used to convey much direct and unspoken cultural information. Will machines ever have the empathy to understand and emotionalize these same features? Will machines have the cognitive ability to understand more than direct procedural instructions or to comprehend the ambiguity and intonation that often goes alongside natural language? These are perhaps goals of many cybernetic research projects today; it is a realistic frontier for the development of a union between the physical world and the technological world. This journey is a series of steps in the encoding of basic data into more sophisticated forms of transactions and then on to complex language and representations of the physical world in virtual environments. This journey has already begun, with the explosion in digital data from devices, sensors across the internet, and the myriad of software applications. Through images, emails, video, and web pages, we are describing our lives and the places we visit, live in, and work in.

We have seen case studies of enterprises that have constructed digital solutions. In this chapter we will explore how digital models can be developed using enterprise architecture modeling tools and techniques.