Aggregated enterprise architecture wisdom
If it’s not a cycle, don’t call it a cycle. In the past few days I’ve had a fair bit of struggle to get clients to understand the difference between a linear-sequence with a beginning, a middle and an end, versus a true cycle where the end of one sequence links to or becomes the […]
The Open Group Cannes Conference Day 2 recap, highlighting plenary sessions by Dr. Saeed Al Daheri, United Arab Emirates Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Peter Haviland, Mick Adams and Garth Emrich, Ernst & Young’s Advisory Services; and Judy Cerenzia,…
Just came across a nice little provocative argument from Pankaj Ghemawat of IESE Business School Barcelona. He writes in his latest HBR article titled, “Who’s Afraid of a Few Big Companies Taking Over the World”. While I understand the principles whic…
Just came across a nice little provocative argument from Pankaj Ghemawat of IESE Business School Barcelona. He writes in his latest HBR article titled, “Who’s Afraid of a Few Big Companies Taking Over the World”. While I understand the principles which…
Just came across a nice little provocative argument from Pankaj Ghemawat of IESE Business School Barcelona. He writes in his latest HBR article titled, “Who’s Afraid of a Few Big Companies Taking Over the World”. While I understand the principles which…
photo credit: metropolitan police(this article is part of the series “12 Heuristics for Enterprise Architecting”)When looking for gaps in the current stage architecture, a useful approach is start by “pushing from the top”—start with the enterpri…
Recently I was discussing a history project with my son. He was writing a paper about the inconsistencies in access to clean water in all parts of the world and their causes. In researching the history of urban water access, he came across the story of the outbreak of cholera in the mid-1800′s in London and the impact it had on modern medicine. A young doctor, John Snow, proposed that cholera was carried in contaminated food […]
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| photo credit: metropolitan police |
When looking for gaps in the current stage architecture, a useful approach is start by “pushing from the top”—start with the enterprise’s strategic objectives, then use the objectives’ linkages with other views to assess if there are any gaps, and then gradually move down through views level by level.
It is important to start the search for gaps from the top, as gaps more closely related to enterprises’ strategic objectives would be uncovered first. This approach decreases the likelihood of missing important gaps or being distracted by less important ones.
While pushing from the top, it is useful to “guide from bottom”—use anecdotal evidence to focus the search for gaps. During our EA exercise, we gathered a number of pain points through conversations with the organization’s employees and reviewing customer satisfaction survey results. However, when we did the analysis by “pushing from the top”, we were puzzled as we could not find those pain points. We analyzed the issue further, focusing on areas where the anecdotal pain points should have shown up, and finally realized that it was because there were missing metrics, and this discovery helped us uncover a second issue—the metrics were not granular enough. If not for the knowledge of the pain points from “the bottom”, our “push from the top” analysis would have yielded nothing.
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| photo credit: metropolitan police |
When looking for gaps in the current stage architecture, a useful approach is start by “pushing from the top”—start with the enterprise’s strategic objectives, then use the objectives’ linkages with other views to assess if there are any gaps, and then gradually move down through views level by level.
It is important to start the search for gaps from the top, as gaps more closely related to enterprises’ strategic objectives would be uncovered first. This approach decreases the likelihood of missing important gaps or being distracted by less important ones.
While pushing from the top, it is useful to “guide from bottom”—use anecdotal evidence to focus the search for gaps. During our EA exercise, we gathered a number of pain points through conversations with the organization’s employees and reviewing customer satisfaction survey results. However, when we did the analysis by “pushing from the top”, we were puzzled as we could not find those pain points. We analyzed the issue further, focusing on areas where the anecdotal pain points should have shown up, and finally realized that it was because there were missing metrics, and this discovery helped us uncover a second issue—the metrics were not granular enough. If not for the knowledge of the pain points from “the bottom”, our “push from the top” analysis would have yielded nothing.
photo credits: i k oLessons learnt as I reflect on a recent four-month Enterprise Architecting (EA) exercise. In the exercise, a 4-person team helped an organization map out where the organization was at, where it wanted to be and how it co…
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| photo credits: i k o |
Lessons learnt as I reflect on a recent four-month Enterprise Architecting (EA) exercise. In the exercise, a 4-person team helped an organization map out where the organization was at, where it wanted to be and how it could get there.
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| photo credits: i k o |
Lessons learnt as I reflect on a recent four-month Enterprise Architecting (EA) exercise. In the exercise, a 4-person team helped an organization map out where the organization was at, where it wanted to be and how it could get there.