Gartner 2025 Hype Cycle: Why EA Without Value Streams Risks Obsolescence

Figure 1 - What EAs Bring to Agile Projects .png

by Daniel Lambert

In Gartner’s 2025 Hype Cycle for Enterprise Architecture, value streams emerge as the essential bridge between strategy and execution. Far from static blueprints, EA is now about influencing outcomes and shaping investments. Frameworks like SAFe® reinforce this shift, making value streams the backbone of planning and delivery. By focusing on value, enterprise architects can align technology with strategy, reduce friction, and embed themselves directly into agile business value realization.

The Importance of Value Streams for Enterprise Architects (According to Gartner)

In the 2025 iteration of Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Enterprise Architecture, one of the recurring themes is the shift from EA as a static design capability to EA as an orchestrator of business outcomes. Gartner highlights business architecture, value stream mapping, and AI-driven insights as core levers in the “Architect the Future” dimension of their EA agenda[i]. Under this framing, value streams are not optional side projects. They’re central instruments for EA to stay relevant in a volatile world.

Why? Because value streams force you to see the enterprise through the lens of value delivery rather than internal silos, diagrams, or platform catalogs. In Gartner’s model, high-impact EA functions will move from producing “blueprints” to influencing decisions, guiding investments, and shaping outcomes that map directly to enterprise value. Value stream thinking provides that connective tissue.

In practice, enterprise architects who embed value streams into their work can:

Align architecture patterns, capabilities, and technology investments to strategic value flows
Detect architectural friction points (bottlenecks, delays) upstream of delivery teams

Provide architectural runway and governance scoped to value flows, not arbitrary domains
Evolve their role from gatekeeper to advisor, embedding themselves into value realization paths

Gartner implicitly warns that EA functions that remain stuck in tool catalogs, rigid frameworks, or ivory-tower architectures risk obsolescence. The organizations that survive will be those where EA influences how value flows through the enterprise.

The Difference Between a Value Stream and a Process

While the terms “value stream” and “process” are sometimes used interchangeably, it’s dangerous to conflate them in an enterprise architecture context. In Figure 2 below is a comparative table highlighting key distinctions:

Figure 2- The Differences between a Value Stream and a Process.png

This table is not exhaustive, but it draws attention to how value streams belong in the strategic zone, the lens through which EA must operate, whereas processes belong in the operational zone. Many EA mistakes occur when architects focus too much on optimizing processes (i.e., local improvements) rather than shaping value streams.

The Enabling Capabilities of a Value Stream

A value stream is more than a sequence of activities; it’s an integrated construct comprising enabling capabilities that ensure value flows smoothly. Here are some of the key enabling capabilities (and roles for EA):

Trigger & Intake. The mechanism (customer request, event, order) that starts the value stream. Architecture must define how triggers feed into systems, how eligibility is validated, how routing is handled.
Orchestration / Flow Management. Coordinating across teams, handoffs, sequencing, routing, exception paths. In EA terms, this is often expressed via an orchestration (integration) layer or event-driven architecture.
Capability Enablement. The set of business and IT capabilities (modular services, domain logic) that deliver value at each stage. EA works to define standardized capability building blocks aligned to streams.
Supporting Infrastructure / Platform. Underlying technology, data, shared services (e.g. identity, APIs, security, observability) that multiple streams rely on.
Governance & Guardrails. Lightweight architecture guardrails, policies, standards, compliance paths. Value stream–scoped governance ensures agility doesn’t devolve into chaos.
Metrics & Feedback. Telemetry, flow metrics (lead time, cycle time, queue length), feedback loops, and analytics that illuminate waste, friction, and opportunities for improvement.
Evolution & Extension. Mechanisms to evolve the stream: change management, modular extension, refactoring, architectural runway to accommodate future value paths.

If your EA practice is serious about influencing outcomes, these capabilities become levers. Architects can selectively invest in orchestration patterns, domain capability libraries, platform services, and feedback instrumentation, all scoped to value streams.

Value Stream: The Heart of SAFe®

In the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®), value streams are not just a nice-to-have. They are foundational[ii]. SAFe® defines two types of streams:

Operational Value Streams (OVS): The flow of value directly to customers (internal or external), the business domain
Development Value Streams (DVS): The flow that builds and sustains the systems that enable operational value streams (i.e., the software product value stream).

Each development value stream may house one or more Agile Release Trains (ARTs), which deliver features and capabilities to support operational streams.

From an EA perspective, this linkage is critical: EA must guide the architectural runway, governance, alignment, and technology vision in the context of value streams. The EA role in SAFe® explicitly includes guiding portfolio value streams, supporting enabler epics, and collaborating with solution/system architects to maintain shared vision.

In short: in SAFe®, value streams become the backbone of planning, prioritization, and architecture. If EA ignores value streams, it loses relevance in a SAFe® environment.

The Importance of Enterprise Architecture in Agile Projects

In traditional thinking, EA is often viewed as a heavyweight, upfront, blueprinting activity, something at odds with agile methodologies’ faster feedback loops. But that dichotomy is false. Modern EA must adapt to Agile, not resist it.

Architecture should not be treated as a deliverable but as an ongoing collaborative function. Bain & Company argues that modern EA is essential for scaling agile. Organizations that integrate EAs closer to delivery, embed them in product teams, and shift from centralized to federated models see higher productivity[iii]. The SAFe® “Enabling Agility with Enterprise Architecture Competency” explicitly shows how EA can integrate with lean portfolio management, adjust continuously, and provide value early[iv].

Here’s what EA brings to agile projects if done right:

Architectural runways (i.e., emergent infrastructure) so that delivery teams aren’t blocked bya lack of support systems
Shared patterns and reference models that avoid each team reinventing the wheel
Platform services and shared services that accelerate velocity
Governance guardrails that prevent divergence and technical debt
Cross-Stream Insights. Insights from cross-stream impact analysis (e.g. changes in one stream that ripple into others)
Strategic Alignment. Coherent mapping between technical investments and strategic value (via value streams)

But the caveat is real: EA must not become a bottleneck. The worst outcome is an EA team that insists on full design artifacts, long sign-off cycles, or rigid standards. Instead, architects must lean into delivery, ride along with development, iterate, and learn continuously.

In fact, the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Enterprise Architecture, 2025 insists that EAs need to shift emphasis from design to decision influence, meaning EA must become a stakeholder in execution, not just an upstream planner.

Value streams are not a fad. In the Gartner 2025 vision for enterprise architecture, they are foundational to elevating EA from diagramming to orchestrating outcomes. For enterprise architects, embracing value stream thinking means reorienting your mindset toward value flow, investing in enabling capabilities, and embedding architecture into the pulse of delivery.

Within agile and SAFe® contexts, value streams become the axis on which planning, architecture, and governance spin. And architecture in agile projects becomes less about heavy upfront design and more about enabling, guiding, adapting, and collaborating.

___________________________________________________

[i] Get your copy of the “Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Enterprise Architecture, 2025” here.

[i] Find additional information about the development of value streams according to SAFe® here.

[ii] Source from Bain & Company: A Modern Enterprise Architecture Is Essential for Scaling Agile.

[iii] Source from SAFe®: Enabling Agility with Enterprise Architecture Competency.