Event-driven architecture (EDA) is now a recommended technology to produce applications that can ingest, analyze, and respond to data in real-time. It provides five key benefits compared to a contemporary application architecture: scalability, resilience, agility, data sharing, and cloud-enabling. Due to this, EDA-style thinking is no longer just for developers and system architects, but it has become very attractive for modern business leaders to adopt in order to aid in business decision making and strategy planning.
As more businesses move away from storing data and adopt EDA for creating business solutions, this will eventually lead to a culture change in the whole organization around how they leverage real-time data, embrace operational agility, and integrate people and digital systems to share in decision making. Below are the key ways in which event-driven architecture facilitates this process change:
1. Context-Informed Decision Making
With real-time event processing, EDA can help your application deliver mission-critical up-to-date, accurate information and provide situational awareness which users need to manage information and make the right business decisions. The decision-making process in organizations will hence shift from a traditional single-person authoritative one to a more situational/context-driven one. Intelligent technologies have been shown to change working behavior and enhance the activities of both management and the board. Focusing on essential content instead of spending time on excessive preparation and design tasks naturally leads to better-informed decisions across the company.
“By 2022, support of event notifications in low-code application platforms and API management tools will make EDA common in new application design.”
– According to Gartner’s Maturity Model For Event Driven Architecture
2. Agile Leadership Style
In today’s world, leaders need to see change coming and be able to make quick and agile responses to market changes. In other words, IT and business leaders need to see changes coming early so they can respond by changing operational states or redeploying organizational resources. Businesses that do not realize this will be at a disadvantage especially at the rate the marketplace is changing today.
Companies should embrace operational agility and move away from their legacy applications to an EDA approach, as this encourages fast responses to real-world threats and efficiency demands. Due to this, leadership styles must shift from rigid to agile.
“Organizations that have been undergoing business agility transformations have shown benefits such as increased revenue, faster turnaround times, and higher-quality offerings.”
– According to the Business Agility Institute’s 2019 Business Agility Report
3. People and Digital Systems to share Decision Making
More than ever, human-machine collaboration will become more important in businesses spanning every industry. Leaders must get used to collaborating with machines and other people in an EDA application to make fast decisions, as information systems rely on feedback from decisions, which in turn modifies the state of the entire system in real time. Human-machine collaboration enables companies to interact with employees and customers in a novel, more effective way. In order to get the most value from this, operations need to be redesigned. Management will need to integrate its people and digital systems to join together in shared decision making.
The journey towards adopting EDA-style thinking can seem like a long one, but it will be key for building IT systems and solutions that can compete in today’s marketplace. In the end, EDA isn’t just a technology, but a way of thinking that applies to modern business leadership. Learn more about how to navigate this new business landscape in our whitepaper, Understanding the Modern Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) Landscape.
