Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
Technology today allows thieves to copy sensitive data, leaving the original in place and thus avoiding detection. Published in October 2012, the Jericho Forum® Data Protection white paper reviews the state of data protection today and where it should be heading to meet tomorrow’s business needs. Continue reading →
John Gotze and I have published a new peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Enterprise Architecture with the title: A Systemic-Discursive Framework for Enterprise Architecture. You can download the paper from here (note: this requires AEA membership). If you are not a member of AEA let me know and I will send you a PDF copy of the paper.
This article examines, through a case study of an Australian government agency, the systemic and discursive properties of Enterprise Architecture adoption in a government enterprise. Through the lens of Luhmann’s generalised systems theory of communication, the authors argue that the manner in which organisational communication is organised throughout the Enterprise Architecture adoption process has a noticeable impact on successful implementation. Two important conclusions are made: Firstly, successful Enterprise Architecture adoption demands sustainable resonance of Enterprise Architecture as a discourse communicated in the enterprise. Secondly, misunderstanding and reshaping Enterprise Architecture as a management discourse is an inherent premise for high quality adoption. The authors propose a new theoretical model, the Enterprise Communication Ecology, as a metaphor for the communicative processes that precede, constrain, and shape Enterprise Architecture implementations. As a result, Enterprise Architecture as a discipline must adopt a systemic-discursive framework in order to fully understand and improve the quality of Enterprise Architecture management programs.
Enjoy!
John Gotze and I have published a new peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Enterprise Architecture with the title: A Systemic-Discursive Framework for Enterprise Architecture. You can download the paper from here (note: this requires AEA membership). If you are not a member of AEA let me know and I will send you a PDF copy of the paper.
This article examines, through a case study of an Australian government agency, the systemic and discursive properties of Enterprise Architecture adoption in a government enterprise. Through the lens of Luhmann’s generalised systems theory of communication, the authors argue that the manner in which organisational communication is organised throughout the Enterprise Architecture adoption process has a noticeable impact on successful implementation. Two important conclusions are made: Firstly, successful Enterprise Architecture adoption demands sustainable resonance of Enterprise Architecture as a discourse communicated in the enterprise. Secondly, misunderstanding and reshaping Enterprise Architecture as a management discourse is an inherent premise for high quality adoption. The authors propose a new theoretical model, the Enterprise Communication Ecology, as a metaphor for the communicative processes that precede, constrain, and shape Enterprise Architecture implementations. As a result, Enterprise Architecture as a discipline must adopt a systemic-discursive framework in order to fully understand and improve the quality of Enterprise Architecture management programs.
Enjoy!
Using Stories to Cross the “Attention Chasm”Many people believe that the attention of audiences follow a U-shaped curve, where audiences remember mainly what said first and last during presentations, leaving a significant chunk of presented material in…
Using Stories to Cross the “Attention Chasm”Many people believe that the attention of audiences follow a U-shaped curve, where audiences remember mainly what said first and last during presentations, leaving a significant chunk of presented material in…
Upon reading the article titled As Chocolate Is To Peanut Butter, Strategy Is To Tactics, by Nacie Carson, author of The Finch Effect, two questions came to mind. How does the team leader/manager identify which of their organization’s strategic outcomes they can impact, either directly or indirectly and how much impact can they actually have?
The post Business Architecture enables Tactical “doers” to implement Strategy – Part 2 appeared first on Louise A Harris on Enterprise Business Architecture.
What’s the best kind of place to do enterprise-architecture and similar work? What are the best environments, for which parts of the work? And why? This was a fun set of questions that came up in my Twitterstream earlier this…
Continuing our series of articles announcing The Case Management Top Influencers within specific segments of the Case Management community, we’re excited to unveil the most influential individuals within academic and standards organizations that are driving Case Management knowledge, growth, adoption, and the ideas to evolve Case Management into a more strategic business platform. View the […]
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There’s been a lot of buzz about Microsoft’s entry into the computing hardware market with the Surface tablets. I’ve been using a Surface Tablet RT (the version using the ARM processor) for the past two weeks and have gotten a … Continue reading →
Link: http://ingine.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/2012-fickle-market-despite-steady-gdp-historical-view-total-market-capitalization/ From Ingine – Enterprise Transformation 00
One of my uncle’s favorite jokes goes like this:
Greg: “Hey Gabriel, say to me ‘what’s the most important thing about humor?’”
Gabriel: “Okay Greg, what’s the mo-“
Greg: “Timing.”
[At this point, you’re supposed to laugh]
“Timing” is the most important thing to business strategy planning
As it turns out, timing is also the most important thing to support business performance management in terms of managing scorecards and synchronizing them with their project portfolios across a company.
Organizational Hierarchy Strategy Alignment. Organizational Hierarchy Strategy Alignment is the linkage between organization’s scorecards and budgets based on an organization’s hierarchy. The head of an organization’s scorecard and budget links to its children’s organizational scorecards and budgets forming a pyramid-like structure of strategy alignment like the illustration below.
Value Stream Strategy Alignment. From a business strategy perspective, there are two types of organizations in a company; Business Organizations and Support Organizations. A Business Organization is an organization that is responsible for a product with scorecard KPIs related to market share, revenue and customer satisfaction.. All other organizations in a company are Support Organizations with scorecard KPIs related to cost, productivity, quality and risk. Business Strategy is set by the Business Organizations and Support Organizations mobilize to enable them, ideally in a sequential flow based on the Product’s value stream (aka core value stream, value chain and operating model). That is, organizations that deliver a product define their scorecards to express what success look like normally using KPIs like “units delivered”, “revenue received”, “customer satisfaction”. Then, working back up the value stream, Support Organizations determine how to sell the product to hit the desired success targets set by the deliver organization. Then, Support Organizations that market the product define KPIs on their scorecards to express what success looks like to hit the sale’s organization’s KPI Targets. Of course, not all processes are directly involved in the core value stream. Support Organizations that support customers, invoice/bill customers, hire people, manage partners, etc all have an enabling/support role and should work back from the core value stream process to determine what their success looks like based on the organization’s processes that they support. Here’s an illustration of a business strategy cascaded via value streams.
The Planning Paradox
More common than you think, organization’s use a planning schedule to arrive at organizational scorecards and budgets that starts at the top of an organizational hierarchy and flows down from there. The problem is that organizations are rarely organized by value streams. In situations where the Business Organization is a sibling organization to Support Organizations, they both have to produce their scorecards and budgets at the same time forcing Support Organizations to scramble to discover the Business Organization’s strategy to then set their own scorecard for success and the budget necessary to achieve it. Even further, there are times when Business Organization functions report to Support Organizations forcing the Support Organization scorecards and budgets to be set before the Business Organization can declare what they need to be successful. In my experience, this situation causes several intense activities in brief stints that ultimately result in a undocumented alignment of business strategy leaving open the possibility of gaps, overlaps and conflicts in plans to execute the business’ strategy.
To add to the problem, it’s also worth mentioning these challenges posed when business strategy is poorly aligned:
* Harvard Business School, 2006, “The Office of Strategy Management”, http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5269.html
@queenchristina_ writes an excellent article on Google, Starbucks, and Amazon, arguing that “for these multinationals immorality is now standard practice” (Independent 13 November 2012). See also Martin Hickman, Good Bean Counters (Independent 16 October 2012).
It is much too easy for British politicians, journalists and taxpayers to get a sense of moral outrage when they discover how little UK tax these American companies pay on their UK earnings. There may be nothing illegal about the fact that the coffee beans are purchased from a Starbucks subsidiary in Switzerland, or that the UK subsidiary pays a royalty for the use of the Starbucks brand to another Starbucks subsidiary in the Netherlands. By a strange coincidence, the Netherlands charges a very low tax rate on royalty payments. Of course there are many British companies that use similar devices to reduce their UK tax bill.
The word “account” essentially means “story”. The Starbucks accountants have constructed a story in which Switzerland and the Netherlands are essential links in the Starbucks value chain. British politicians have constructed a different story in which Starbucks is ripping off its British hosts. The moral outrage comes from the clash between these two narratives.
When two narratives clash, it seems natural for us to want to impose our preferred narrative on the Other. Wouldn’t it be grand if Starbucks saw the error of its ways and started to pay a fair rate of UK tax. Or wouldn’t it be equally grand if the UK tax laws were changed to regulate against these tax avoidance schemes? Or from Starbuck’s point of view, wouldn’t it be grand if UK corporate tax rates were reduced, so it could simplify its value chain at no cost to its shareholders? (Obviously words like “grand” and “fair” depend on the narrative.)
Of course, what is more likely is that the politicians will issue some threat of tighter regulation, the companies will make some temporary gesture to alleviate public hostility, and that the media will move onto the next target. In the meantime, politicians and the media can make things uncomfortable for corporate executives in the public eye.
And here’s a slightly older example – the attempts by the US Government to hold BP to account for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. One BP executive complained that “The administration keeps pushing the boundaries on what we are responsible for.” (Wall Street Journal 1 June 2010 via NakedCapitalism)
In any case, there are always going to be conflicting narratives. I was at a workshop in the City this morning discussing how externalities might affect the future of money and the future of commerce. We discussed a range of topics, from mega-cities to carbon trading.
But what exactly are these externalities? Almost anything that one person thinks to be part of The System and another person thinks to be outside The System. As William P. Fisher, Jr points out, “If we have to articulate and communicate a message that people then have to act on, we remain a part of the problem and not part of the solution.” (Reimagining Capitalism Again, Sept 2011).
Oliver Greenfield identifies the following challenge:
“The externalities created by companies – or, for that matter, nation states – in their pursuit of self-interest can seem rational at the local, country and even regional level. But at a global level, in a closed system, externalities are costs. What is rational at a company or nation state level is irrational at a global level.” (Green Economy Coalition, April 2012)
Thus we have conflicting narratives, which result from disagreement about system boundaries (including time horizon as a type of boundary). A true systems approach might give us a systematic way of playing contested narratives off against each other.
See also
William P. Fisher, Jr, Question Authority (Oct 2011)
José M. Ramos, Temporalities of the Commons: Toward Narrative Coherence and Strategic Vision (Nov 2012)
Linked-In discussion on Good Bean Counters
and my post on Regulation and Complexity (Oct 2012)