Transformation by Design: Enterprise Architecture for Change

Organizations invest heavily in new architectures, platforms, processes, and organizational structures, yet transformation often produces only local improvements. The reason is that architecture and organization do not change independently. Decisions about software boundaries affect teams and responsibilities, while organizational structures shape the architecture that emerges.

Transformation by Design explores how enterprise and software architecture can be used deliberately to influence this relationship. It introduces the Systemic Event Discovery Approach (SEDA), combining Systems Thinking, Domain Driven Design, EventStorming, and Team Topologies to discover system behavior, identify meaningful domains, and locate leverage points for change.

The session combines a focused introduction with an interactive exercise. Participants will work with a realistic transformation scenario, examine events and dependencies, discover domain and organizational boundaries, and explore how targeted interventions can initiate bottom up transformation without attempting to redesign the entire organization at once.

Participants will learn how to:
- Recognize events and recurring problems as signals of deeper system behavior.
- Identify dependencies between software architecture, business domains, and organizational structures.
- Discover domain boundaries and potential leverage points instead of starting with a predefined target architecture.
- Use Systems Thinking, Domain Driven Design, EventStorming, and Team Topologies together within a transformation process.
- Design targeted interventions that enable bottom up transformation while keeping the wider system in view.

The session is designed as a two hour combination of presentation and hands on work.
- 45-50 minutes: Introduction to the transformation problem, architectural and organizational dependencies, and SEDA.
- 60 minutes: Interactive group exercise based on a realistic transformation scenario.
- 10 minutes: Discussion, findings, and Q&A.

The exercise gives participants the opportunity to apply the ideas directly rather than only discussing them conceptually.