Enterprise Architecture for Digital Business

Chapter 6. Observability and Automation

Michael Wiley, F5 VP of Engineering and CTO of Applications

Isaac Asimov is most notably associated with the ethics and morality of robotics, thanks to his series of short stories that eventually became the well-known novel, I, Robot. As with most science fiction focused on AI, the theme of digital processing being superior to that of human capabilities rises to the surface.

Traditional enterprise architectures were designed to support human operators and decision makers. Team structures, systems, and even applications were all designed on the presumption that human beings, following manual processes, would be at the helm.

Digital service means the service can self-detect its customer experiences, bottlenecks or deviations in the workflows, or new distribution of customer demands. As such, the digital service should have built-in “sensors” to detect these signals and ways to quickly bring changes to the digital service.

In a digital business, the volume of information generated and requiring immediate processing and analysis would overwhelm even an army of human operators. To return to the principle that “form follows function,” today’s enterprise architectures constrain business to the limits of human scale. A digital business requires the capability for digital scale: the capability to automatically detect bottlenecks or performance deviations in the customer experience. To achieve this, digital services should have built-in sensors. Furthermore, ...