Enterprise architecture at Mozilla: An astrolabe to guide the future

How can Mozilla evolve its products and capabilities to serve the global, human-driven internet of the future? The company is guided by its mission and supported by the capabilities of its staff and community. Michael Van Kleeck dives into how Mozilla uses its version of enterprise architecture to wisely explore, evaluate, and pivot to and from future opportunities.

How can Mozilla evolve its products and capabilities to serve the global, human-driven internet of the future? The company is guided by its mission and supported by the capabilities of its staff and community. Michael Van Kleeck dives into how Mozilla uses its version of enterprise architecture to wisely explore, evaluate, and pivot to and from future opportunities. At the heart of Mozilla’s enterprise architecture is the Mozilla City Map, a multilevel and evolving view of all the capabilities that Mozilla has and is developing. Those capabilities span multiple communities, including staff and volunteers, and reach around the globe. Maintaining the City Map and keeping it useful to Mozillians at all levels of engagement is fundamental to helping Mozilla understand who it is and what it can do. Working from the current state of the City Map, Mozilla’s architects enable all teams and communities to envision what their futures look like. They create one-year views that encompass what is currently planned and ask questions to help Mozilla develop more visionary three-year plans that guide long-range decision making. Like the present-view City Map, all of these views are living, breathing, collaborative artifacts that evolve as the company’s understanding of the future and its boundaries evolve. Using the capabilities described in and insights gathered from the City Map views, Mozilla’s futurists remix these views using a variety of revenue models and mission-impact models to explore how Mozilla can most successfully support its mission of maintaining the web as a global public resource. Enterprise architecture provides fuel to a number of games where these explorations take place. Mozilla’s enterprise architecture practice enables it to take the most successful results of exploratory exercises and prototype them rapidly using appropriate resources. The outcomes of those prototyping exercises feed back into the City Map and iteratively guide Mozilla to where it can have the most impact on the global internet, given its resource constraints and unique capabilities.