We are hearing the tales of severely ill or dying enterprise architectural efforts in even the best of organizations. It really shouldn’t be a surprise as architectural efforts are long, slow and change before they are complete. Even if an organization manages to complete one, things are changing so fast the value of even a rare complete architecture is dubious at best. Leveraging digital twins can be a game changer for architecture. A digital twin is a digital replica of physical assets, processes, people, places, systems and devices that can be used for management purposes.

Architecture is important, but it tends to isolate and not connected to reality often times. Basing the current architecture on digital twins allows for a reality-based current state and helps make a case for making changes incrementally or in more significant portions. Target architectures could also be modeled from a base of current digital twin behaviors.

Digital twins are changing in real time, so having a current architecture linked to now gives an advantage especially when linked to some machine learning, simulation and other forms of predictive assists. Since the measurement of the digital twin can be amped up to real time, the link to reality can be instantaneous if desired.

Digital twins interacting in an animated fashion gives an accurate picture of what’s going on in various levels of neighborhoods of interacting contexts to give a more exact sense of behavior and interaction results. This can allow for better and faster managerial intervention to indicators and tolerance factors.

The behavior of an asset by looking at its state and isolated behavior can point to opportunities to adjust. Interactions with other assets, resources or contexts can point to patterns that may look like a new scenario that was not planned for and project where that scenario may lead. The emerging scenarios can point management to opportunities or threats.

Combining digital twin behavior with algorithms like simulation can project down-stream impacts and intercept situations before they occur. Responses can be planned and put into place and new tolerances can be established.

Old school enterprise architectures have limited value today, except for defining things like target business outcomes, target business competencies and target skills. Super-charging architecture with digital twins are the answer for the modern digital organization.