Architecture

What is culture and how does it affect the practice of Enterprise Architecture?

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As Architects we often spend countless hours working toward delivering great artifacts, including a future state, current state and roadmap to assist our customers in developing a vision and plan toward transformation or maturity. This work is often completed and finds its place on the CIO’s bookshelf or the Lead Architect’s desk with little action or even a second look. Why is this work not actively embraced by many organizations beyond the IT walls or even within the IT organization?

Don’t misunderstand my position, I believe all of the work completed during an iterative EA process that outputs the artifacts I mentioned above add value, although if the organization is not “culturally” ready to embrace the work and transform then the effort is for not.

Culture is defined in many ways by many scholars, although I find it easiest to define culture as interactions and relationships between members of an organization or unit within that organization. This assumes there is an organizational culture and sub cultures within that organization. With this said, it is important that we as architects focus on the overarching organizational culture to better understand whether our customers are ready for an EA engagement.

Our first priority is to ensure we are engaged with the highest level of sponsorship within the organization. For instance, developing physical architectures with the platform division does not constitute Enterprise Architecture, but rather a Technical Architecture and will only have an effect on that sub culture within the organization. EAs need to ensure they are seated alongside the CIO, CFO, COO or even the Chief Executive to ensure efforts toward cultural transformation can be enabled via strong sponsorship.

In the public sector this can be a difficult task as most executives are focused on business related practices and often see the CIO and vendors as “IT focused.” It is critical for our communication during initial contact to be business focused. Conversations about technology are not held until key items, like capability modeling, guiding principles and governance structures are embraced by the organization as a result of cultural change. Once these cultural elements are embraced and socialized technology decisions will be easily facilitated with little debate or power struggles. Remember, the “sponsor” understands how important organizational transformation is at this point in the evolution and will help sub groups understand the vision. Communication and vision are critical elements at this point in the journey toward transformation.

Once we have commitment from the sponsor it is critical for the sponsor to understand the partnership needed between the EA Team and Executive Team. The EA Team is not chartered with creating mission, vision, strategy etc. but rather with understanding the Executive Team’s goals and objectives for the organization and aligning the technology investments with these goals and objectives. Every investment decision made is a direct representation of how the organization’s culture is manifesting itself physically.

Are You Certifiable?

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I am asked this far more than you might imagine. Often it is after I’ve recalled some obtuse nugget of information like, Q is the only letter that does not appear in the name of any U.S. State.

Over the course of my life, as the conditions have c…

We do what you say we will do – Integrity By Architecture

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One of the chief complaints of senior executives in midsize and large companies is that their organizations don’t “execute” on the goals that they set.  This concern is so common, it’s the butt of jokes.  Entire systems of governance and measurement are created specifically to provide assurance to senior execs so that they can maintain some level of public integrity.  Yet, when Enterprise Architects describe their roles to their peers, it is surprisingly rare to hear them talk about this issue.  That is a mistake.  Let’s talk about how to tell the story of Enterprise Architecture as the maintainer of executive integrity.

In 2003, when Motorola sent their CEO Chris Galvin packing, USA Today wrote about what a “good guy” he was:

He turned out to be a lackluster CEO, which, sadly, often seems to be the case when good guys land in the corner office. Friday, Motorola said Galvin would resign. Motorola under Galvin had suffered through six years of disappointing results, laid off one-third of its workforce, failed hugely on new ventures like Iridium, and waited for turnarounds that never happened. The board apparently had had enough; Galvin thought he’d better leave.

I have to say I feel bad for Galvin. Of course, I wasn’t a Motorola shareholder who watched the stock go from $60 (split-adjusted) in 2000 to about $11 last week. Nor am I a laid-off Motorola employee. And yes, Galvin was paid handsomely: $2.8 million in salary and bonus last year.

Did Galvin fail, or did Motorola fail to execute on Galvin’s strategy?  The board of Motorola, and the board of any company, won’t see a difference.  Note that this story has happened over and over in high-tech, from Steve Ballmer to Michael Dell, usually without the board firing their CEO.  Far from being limited to high-tech, stories abound of retailers (Best Buy), manufacturers (General Motors), and financial services companies (too many to name) that have suffered through strategies that failed to pay off.

Here’s what stockholders see: you said “X” would happen and it didn’t.  You lied. 

From their perspective, the CEO loses credibility for lack of integrity.

Integrity is a personality trait and a virtue.  A person has integrity when they can be trusted to perform exactly as they said that they would perform.  In other words, they “do what they said they would do.”  This person makes a commitment and keeps it.  This means that they make commitments that they are fairly sure that they CAN keep, and they don’t forget the commitments that they made.  In every high-performing team that I’ve been a part of, each member had a high level of integrity.  Integrity is key to developing trust.  If you do what you say you will do, people will trust you.

Executives need to develop trust just as much as individual contributors do.   For private for-profit organizations, those stakeholders own stock, and purchase the goods and services of the company.  For public organizations, those stakeholders are voters and legislators.  Where an individual contributor must earn the trust of his manager and his or her peers, an executive is in a very visible position.  They have to build trust daily. 

Building that trust requires that they make bold pronouncements about the things that the organization will do under their leadership… and then their organization has to perform those activities.  And that’s a key difference.  When an individual contributor says “I will do this,” they are talking about their own performance.  Rarely are individual contributors held accountable for failures of the people that they cannot control.  Executives, on the other hand, are not talking about their personal performance.  They are talking about the performance of the many (often hundreds, sometimes thousands) of people under them. 

An executive doesn’t actually “control” the people under him.  He or she must lead them.  Sure, there can be an occasional “public hanging” (as Jack Welsh used to encourage), but, for the most part, the executive’s ability to speak with integrity comes from the trust he has in his organization to perform.  In other words, how will with “they” correctly do what “I” said they would do?

Enterprise Architecture is a keeper of executive integrity

Enterprise Architecture is the only profession (that I know of) that is focused on making sure that the strategy announced by an executive actually comes to pass.  Enterprise Architects exist to make sure that the needed programs are created, and executed well, keeping in mind the end goals all along the way.  EA’s go where angels fear to tread: to execute strategies and produce the desired results if they can be produced. 

If you value executive integrity, EA is an investment worth making.

Are Your Systems as Hard as Glass?

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I have to admit to loving all three Jurassic Park movies, possibly because there was absolutely no chance of it being real. There is a kind of appeal to seeing a live Brontosaurus, or a Triceratops, or a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Appealing…, from a suitab…

Enterprise Architecture in China: Who uses this stuff?

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by Chris Forde, GM APAC and VP Enterprise Architecture, The Open Group Since moving to China in March 2010 I have consistently heard a similar set of statements and questions, something like this…. “EA? That’s fine for Europe and America, … Continue reading →

Rational Rationalization – Part the First

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With the upheaval of the economic downturn came a spate of mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, splits and buy-outs. The ensuing chaos of the resulting technology portfolios cannot really be overstated. Many surviving companies are just a mess. In norm…

Placing Architecture Properly into Scrum Processes

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As I’m about to complete my share of a longer engagement on using Lean principles to improve the processes at an online services firm, it occurred to me that the efforts we undertook to properly embed Architecture practices into their Scrum process were novel.  I haven’t seen much written about how to do this in practice, and I imagine others may benefit from understanding the key connection points as well.  Hence this post.

First off, let me be clear: Agile software development practices are not at all averse to software architecture.  But let’s be clear about what I mean by software architecture.  In an agile team, most decisions are left to the team itself.  The team has a fairly short period of time to add a very narrow feature (described as a user story) to a working base of code and demonstrate that the story works.  The notion of taking a couple of months and detailing out a document full of diagrams that explains the architecture of the system: pretty silly. 

The value of software architecture is that key decisions are made about the core infrastructure of the system itself: where will generalizations lie?  Will a layered paradigm be used, and if so, what are the responsibilities of each layer?  What modules will exist in each layer and why will they be created? How will the responsibilities of the system be divided up among the layers and components?  How will the modules be deployed at scale?  How will information flow among the modules and between the system and those around it?

The way these questions are answered will indicate what the architecture of the system is.  There are many choices here, and the “correctness” of any choice is a balance between competing demands: simplicity, security, cost, flexibility, availability, reliability, usability, correctness, and many more.  (These are called “System Quality Attributes”).  Balancing between the system quality attributes takes thought and careful planning.

So when does this happen in an agile process?

Let’s consider the architect’s thinking process a little.  In fact, let’s break the software architecture process into layers, so that we can divide up the architectural responsibility a little.  You have three layers of software architectural accountabilities.  (Repeat: I’m talking about Software Architecture, not Enterprise Architecture.  Please don’t be confused.  Nothing in this post is specific to the practice of Enterprise Architecture).  All this is illustrated in the diagram below.  (Click on the diagram to get something a little more readable. 

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At the top, you have the Aligning processes of software architecture.  These processes consider the higher levels of enterprise architecture (specifically the business and information architecture) to create To-Be Software Models of the entire (or relevant) software ecosystem.  If you’ve ever seen a wall chart illustrating two dozen or more software systems with connectors illustrating things like flow of data or dependencies, you’ve seen a model of the type I’m referring to.  Creating and updating these kinds of diagrams is a quarterly or semi-annual process and reflects the gradual changes in the strategy of the enterprise. 

In the middle, you have the Balancing processes of software architecture.  These processes consider the needs of a single system but only from the level of deciding why the software will be divided up into modules, layers, and components, how that division of responsibility will occur, and what the resulting system will look like when deployed in specific technologies in a specific environment.  All of this can be conveyed in a fairly short document that is rich in diagrams with a small amount of text explaining the choices.  This occurs once when a system is moving forward, and the software architecture can be developed alongside the first couple of sprints as input to the third and subsequent sprints.

At the bottom, you have the Realization processes of software architecture.  This is where the architecture becomes software, and this is where decisions are made about the choice of specific design patterns, the appropriate level of configurability vs. simplicity, and the ability to demonstrate whether the actual intent of the architecture occurs in practice.  In agile, this layer occurs within the team itself.  The software architect can offer advice about what patterns to use, but it is up to the team to realize that advice and/or decide not to implement it.  The team will very likely implement the software architecture as described, but may choose to improve upon it.

What does the process look like

There are many visualizations of scrum running around.  Some are described in books, others in papers or blog posts.  Most share some common elements.  There is a product backlog that, through the magic of sprint planning, the team extracts a subset for the sprint.  This becomes the sprint backlog.  The illustrations then tend to show the various rhythms of Sprint as cycles (sprint cycles and daily cycles), ending with a demonstration and retrospective.

In order to illustrate and train a team on all elements, including the business analysis elements, we chose to be a bit more explicit about the steps PRIOR to sprint planning, including the processes of creating and improving the stories prior to the start of a sprint.  (as above, click on the image to enlarge it).

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Astute observers will notice that we added a step that we are calling “pre-sprint story review.”  This is a meeting that occurs one week prior to the start of a sprint.  It is called by the product owner and he or she invites “senior chickens” (architects, user experience leads, development and test leads, and any other “non-team” members that want a say in the sprint. 

In that week prior to sprint planning, those folks, working with the product owner, can improve the stories, add constraints, refine the description and acceptance criteria.  And here’s where the architects get to play.  Architects fulfilling the role of “Balancing” in the model above will have (or can create) an outline document describing the architecture of the software system, and can “link” that document to the SPECIFIC STORIES that are impacted by that design. 

(Note: assuming you are using a tool like Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server, that fully enables Scrum in multiple forms, this is a nearly trivial activity since a document can be easily linked to any story.  Enough advertising.)

So is an architect a chicken or a pig?  Answer: depends on what “layer” the architecture is at.  The top two layers are chickens.  The third layer, realization, is done by the team itself.  The person on the team may or may not have the title of “designer”.  (I’d prefer that they did not, but that’s just because I believe that ALL team members should be trained to fulfill that role.  In reality, the skill may not be wide spread among team members).  Therefore, the third layer is done by the pigs. 

I hope this provides some insight into how a team can embed software architecture into their scrum cycles.  As always, I’m interested in any feedback you may wish to share.

Questions for the Upcoming Platform 3.0™ Tweet Jam

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By Patty Donovan, The Open Group Last week, we announced our upcoming tweet jam on Thursday, June 6 at 9:00 a.m. PT/12:00 p.m. ET/5:00 p.m. BST, which will examine how convergent technologies such as Big Data, Social, Mobile and The Internet of … Continue reading →