EA Voices

I just installed the newest version of WordPress. I am wondering how this is going to pan out. I switched back from Ghost as I was sick of writing markdown for everything.
Stay tuned.

Business architecture is a challenging capability. Designing the business, optimizing its processes and streamlining the way information is collected and used is very interesting, but most of all very difficult. We have entered the New Normal, crafted by crises we had (or have?), rapid spread and adoption of ideas and technology, and the expiration date of common business paradigms is close.  

I read a very interesting blog post by KLM’s SVP e-commerce Mr. Martijn van der Zee: “I Have a Lack of Strategic Vision” in which he points out that strategic visions in PowerPoint won’t cut-it for Air France-KLM in the digital era we are in today. He gives a number of reasons why long-term strategic plans are not working for him:

1. Vision documents or strategy PowerPoints are drafted from an internal perspective (the company, or the department of a specific employee).
2. These documents present a simplified overview of what’s happening in the outside world. 
3. The author would feel really good about the document and would confuse strategic vision and effort with progress.

“In this new digital world, nobody knows where we’re going. The only way to get a glimpse of what’s happening is by trying to understand what our customer wants, build a working prototype and test it in the real world. Fail fast and often. PowerPoints won’t help you do that; building, testing and tweaking will.”

Prototyping in projects and setting up experiments are all part of a learning cycle in organizations. John Boyd introduced the OODA-loop to express a decision cycle of observe, orient, decide, and act. Since the speed of opportunities passing by is increasing, your organization need to speed up its OODA-cycle. How do you contribute to the OODA-loop of your organization?

The classic Architects view

Architects typically will argue that the temporary websites and databases behind the suggested prototype approach tends to stay a little longer than innovators and project managers promise when deploying them.  Architects know all about legacy, organic growth of organizations and their application landscapes, as well as the enormous efforts it will take to rationalize these landscapes. Architects prefer to craft a plan up-front, discuss the underlying principles (hoping to get them approved by senior management), design an integral picture of the preferred future, analyze the impact of the proposed changes and then start projects.

The internal focus and lack of speed in this approach are brought to the table by KLM’s Martijn van der Zee mentioned above. MIT’s Joi Ito goes even further in his TED-talk on innovation in the era of the Internet, by stating that the internet is fundamentally changing the way we innovate. Connecting, sharing and solving problems is faster than ever, due to the internet. The old-school “MBA-way of innovation” is way to slow and does not benefit from the connected world we are in today.

Okay, right… but what does that mean for the way we are architecting (in) organizations?

The alternative: Contribute to flexibility and scalability

1. Architects in the New Normal should not hit the breaks on innovation, but facilitate innovation with all means they have at hand. By creating and presenting reusable building blocks (e.g. standard processes, information bundles, application services, technical standards), architects contribute to speeding up change. The more well-documented reusable building blocks you have available, the faster you can chain them into a working prototype with added steps/functionality to be bought (from the cloud) or build. 
2. Architects in the New Normal should be able to engage with people that prefer other communication and learning styles then the one they prefer. “Doing” and “Concrete experience” is what business managers typically prefer, where architects prefer a style oriented on “Thinking”, and in some cases “Observation and reflection”. There is no wrong or right in these learning styles, it just helps you to take a different approach and go through all steps of learning to maximize the learning experience.

   
   http://shagdora.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/kolb1.jpg

3. Architects in the New Normal should have a vision on speed. What are the fast moving processes and channels in the organization and where do we need to maximize stability? Gartner refers to this as Pace Layering, to distinguish “Systems of innovation”, “Systems of differentiation” and “Systems of record”. Although Gartner applies this concept on applications, one can abstract from that and look at business capabilities in general, from the perspective of these layers. All layers have their own pace of change and capabilities can move over time from the innovation-layer to differentiation layer on to the record layer. 
   Also architects in the New Normal should provide a set of criteria to help business managers decide on scaling up an experiment, including scenarios on the integration or re-engineering of functionality that was developed in a stand-alone experiment, to have it fit with the rest of the application landscape. Scalability is a key challenge, both for start-ups as well as for experiments in larger organizations. But also other kinds of –ilities are an issue in moving from experiment to full-blown solution, e.g. maintainability, security, interoperability, etc. etc.

   
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   A very important development in the New Normal in this respect is the cloud. Embracing the cloud with a clear cloud strategy will be beneficial for all three tasks pointed out above here. Cloud-based experiments are often much easier to set up than on-premise solutions (where you need to buy servers, licenses, etc. before you can even start to experiment), and scalability is often less of an issue. On the other hand, integration of cloud solutions with on-premise ones (or with other cloud stuff) is not always easy. Architects can contribute there with a vision on cloud integration and define a set of standards to minimize integration effort.

   Business architecture techniques help you in this process. BiZZdesign applies these techniques in the tools, training and consultancy we provide. We strongly believe architecture capabilities should be focussing on the creation of business value from rationalisation and optimization as well as from growth and innovation. 

Forbes Contributor Jason Bloomberg recently wrote a few articles addressing the current state of Enterprise Architecture. In his first post, he explored whether enterprise architecture is completely broken, a question not uncommonly heard in our industry.

We often discuss the changing world of Enterprise Architecture on the Troux blog, and it has been an ongoing debate inside Troux as to whether we should even use the term EA when defining our market. I have to admit, when I first arrived at Troux, I didn’t even know what Enterprise Architecture was. I have always viewed what we do as being about delivering business value. I think the original EA practitioners had that in mind too, but maybe they were a decade too early or just couldn’t land at the right process and tools to deliver on the vision.

In Bloomberg’s article he compares EA practitioners to Milton, the Innotech employee from the 90’s movie classic, Office Space, who continued to get paid while not actually having a role in the organization.

While EA’s role has drastically changed over the years, I like to think we are all now part of a sequel – Office Space 2: The Rise of Milton. Enterprise architecture is no longer an IT-centric discipline focused on creating complex colorful maps and models only understood by a few. To use another Office Space analogy, it is no longer about producing “pieces of flare” in hopes of proving to the business that EA is delivering some sort of value.

Does that mean EA is obsolete? Quite the contrary.

The art of making business decisions has been around since the dawn of trade. Today, every aspect of a business is part of a digitally connected enterprise, meaning the impact of every business decision ripples across the entire organization. Making critical decisions without understanding these effects can have devastating effects. The speed of industry change and the complexity represented by the portfolios that make up your business mean that informed decisions need to happen quicker than ever to remain competitive. It’s our EA friends who were shamed to the basement office that are now poised to make that happen.

Sounds overwhelming, but at Troux, we teach our customers that there is no need to boil the ocean. Understanding your connected enterprise can happen with bite size undertakings, along a logical timeline. By identifying critical business capabilities and harnessing the right data to gain perspective we can land at an ideal course of action for moving the business forward.

While Bloomberg’s article starts out questioning whether there is a future for EA, he actually arrives at the similar conclusion to us and expands on that vision in his follow up article “Agile Enterprise Architecture Finally Crosses the Chasm.”

The sequel is here, and from what we have experienced with our own customers, it is going to be a big hit at the box office. Milton was able to quickly determine that the “people to cake ratio” was too big. With today’s data, knowledge and tools, we can quickly learn so much more. Here are just a few examples of companies using the Troux’s version of enterprise architecture to make timely, informed business decisions.

Cisco: Global networking solutions giant, Cisco, has successfully implemented Troux’s Enterprise Portfolio Management solution to help define a common desired operating model across its business units. This in-turn helps them identify and divest businesses that are unlikely to deliver the desired top-or-bottom-line results.  In addition, Troux is also used to compare potential acquisition targets to the target model to help quickly identify the true value of potential acquisitions.

U.S. Census Bureau: In 2012, the U.S Census Bureau set out to build optimal IT solutions to handle a myriad of challenges to the business. With an Enterprise Architecture (EA) discipline enabled by Troux, the Bureau now has a more integrated business overall, underpinned by an IT decision process, collaborative governance, and a common knowledge base. It all adds up to increased agility, efficiency and innovation

Bayer: Bayer started working with Troux in 2008, and the two companies have had much success together. To date, Bayer has used Troux to manage and optimize its landscape across information, technology, applications and business architecture portfolios.

Last week I talked about 10 Easy Steps to Good Data.  This week I would like to continue talking about good data and how to manage it following an Enterprise Information Management strategy.
What is Enterprise Information Management (EIM)?
Gartner de…