Sustainable Enterprise Architecture: A Critical Imperative for Substantiating Artificial Intelligence

The industry is at an interesting inflection point with Artificial Intelligence (AI) rapidly emerging as an integral part of business strategy and operations. Recognizing this central role of AI, there is an increasing demand on Enterprise Architectures to play a pivotal role in sustainably integrating AI environments and driving organization's transformation agenda. This has opened significant opportunities and challenges for the enterprise architecture (EA) function in harnessing the full potential of AI. A critical analysis therefore explicates the need for a rapid refresh of traditional enterprise architectures by architecting sustainability principles into its design and instill a holistic view to guide its evolution. This paper therefore seeks to analyze the existing enterprise architectural principles and strengthen its core by applying sustainable architectural principles that guide to a holistic architectural blueprint. Notwithstanding to define and strengthen architectural design, this approach believes in tapping into digital architecture best practices that enables secure access of data using open interfaces to ensure interoperability on an adaptive design with resiliency. The principles would provide the basic guidelines in defining organization's AI strategy and provide the basis for architectural design decisions on setting about organizations AI mission.