RBP-EA: There’s gonna be a revolution…

This is part of a series of posts that I’ll be doing about ‘The Really Big Picture‘ at a societal/economic level, in relation to enterprise-architecture.
This post sets out some of the scope and scale of the changes that are or are likely to be coming up on the horizon over the next few years and/or […]

RBP-EA: From ‘Really Big Picture’ into real-world practice

This continues the themes of the previous posts, ‘The Really Big Picture for enterprise-architecture‘ and RBP-EA: The dangers of business-centric ‘enterprise’-architecture.
Much like strategy, enterprise-architecture is one of the few business-disciplines that explicitly focusses on the mid- to longer-term future. As such, one of the unfortunate side-effects is that much of what we do is at risk […]

Strategy, tactics, operations and emotion

This one’s been brewing for a while, but the final trigger to get it down in writing was a tweet from yesterday evening:
RT @vernaallee: RT @timkastelle: Good post & important point by @jorgebarba – It matters how you play the game. Not just being first http://bit.ly/lbAi6q
Will recommend Jorge’s post – it makes some very good […]

Is EA Finally Moving to the CIO Leadership Table?

bg outline
CIO 
At the recent Troux Worldwide Conference there was plenty of talk among attendees and speakers about whether EA has a place at the “leadership table”. Some proclaimed that EA was still not seated at the table, while others lamented that EA has a seat at the table but has not yet been invited to actually enjoy the meal.

Troux was listening and decided to host a follow-on, in-depth discussion next Wednesday, May 25th, at the “EA & CIO’s: State of the Union” webinar, 10:00 am CST.

Moderated by Bill Laberis, from CIO Magazine, the webinar features Frank Malta, executive director and chief architect at pharmaceutical powerhouse Merck, and Bill Cason, CTO at Troux. 

Bill Laberis will kick-off the discussion by sharing the latest data from CIO Magazine’s annual “State of the CIO” survey. According to that survey, nearly 70% of CIOs today are focused on developing IT strategies to accelerate business goals. This reinforces the notion that EA has moved beyond the ‘alignment’ phase to the ‘let’s achieve business results’ phase of maturation. This means focusing on business process innovation, fostering agility, and driving transformation throughout the enterprise.

According to a similar survey conducted by Troux, 77% of chief architects and/or head of enterprise architects already have a seat at the CIO leadership table, and 60% of CIOs and/or head of EA are heading an IT Strategy Management Program. Does this mean that EA is fulfilling its promise of bridging the gap between IT and the business?

Frank will then describe how, using Troux, Merck built an “Enterprise Business Capability Model” that provides a detailed visual map of business capability strategically aligned with IT resources. The model uses a five-layer approach to trace business process and capabilities to solutions and technologies and provides a complete view of portfolio investment, technology and associated business cases. With this information, Merck business and IT executives can now discuss about business processes, systems and resources in business terms based on facts, rather than guesswork.

Bill Cason will then talk about the external forces  driving EA toward a more classic Business Technology Management (BTM) approach which addresses the unification of business and IT decision making across the enterprise.

The webinar will also address issues such as moving the lens of EA from a technology focus to a business focus, how to make EA “consumable” and specific techniques for getting to results quickly, a must have for CIOs and their leadership team

The panel will then turn to listener questions. Join the discussion next Wednesday with your own questions. Registration is still open here



Categories Uncategorized

A week in Tweets: 01-07 May 2011

Almost up to date: the previous week’s worth of links and Tweets – sorted into the usual categories, of course.

Enterprise-architecture, business-architecture, business-strategy, business-innovations and other themes at the larger business scope:

practicingEA: Unintended consequences of hyper-connected. Next #entarch challenge: predict these b4 disaster http://tinyurl.com/6zaegec >yes, exactly… strong recommend #itarch #entarch #bizarch #emergence
EABard: 11 Soft Skills For […]

@tetradian on Architecture v Design – my observations

I just read Tom’s thought-provoking post 

Great conversations on enterprise-architecture here http://tinyurl.com/3uu2bn3

In this post Tom notes:
“The other point was an easy way to resolve the age-old argument about architecture versus design. They’re actually part of the same spectrum from vision to realisation, from ‘why’ to ‘how’ and so on. The only difference between them is which way they face: architecture tends to face ‘upward’, towards the big-picture,  the vision, or ‘why’, whilst design tends to face ‘downward’, towards the detail, the real-world realisation, the how and who and where and when and with-what”.

I’m afraid I believe  it’s not as simple as that. The design work I do is the design of the “big” not the detail. I also do architecture work and make use of the work of other architects. This helps constrain the “big” design with useful principles, patterns, reference models, standards and policies. These designs are the ‘action-focused’ means-by-which the business Vision is realised. This, IMO, has more do with mindset than with level of detail – I refer here to Roger Martin’s Design Thinking (I believe to be the basis of Gartner’s Hybrid Thinking) and his thought on Validity-Reliability continuum – I posted about a while ago here http://tinyurl.com/3488rlj – Balancing Reliability-X and Validity-Y

You can see from this post, made in 2009, I too, can be accused of ‘smudging’ the boundaries between Design and Architecture ( and sometimes strategy as well!). In my defence, these concepts often manifest as different views of essentially the same desired business outcome.

Maybe the difference is that architecture is more focused, on the contextual, structural and codes-of-parctice whereas design is more focused on a specific outcome. Both are pinned to Vision regardless of size and scope. The architecture frames the design and ensures consistency and coherence over the long term and, I would argue, that a Biz-Vision-focused EA is the foundation for good design. I strongly agree that the architecture should be business-led and therefore also facing ‘up’ alongside ‘Big Design’ of business change (aka Business Change Design). To put another way,  my work is mostly facing ‘up’ wether I’m acting as architect or designer.

One final observation is that in IT circles the term Design seems to have a narrower meaning than elsewhere. So the debate within IT-centric worldview seems to be rooted in the traditional argument about the differences between Analysis and Design, from an Systems Development Life-Cycle PoV, rather than Roger Martin’s more philosophical Design Thinking. I’m concerned that Tom’s observation “design tends to face ‘downwards'” adds fuel to this IT-centric understanding (which I know from many discussions he would be very unhappy about!).

Does EA practice include both ‘Architecture’ and ‘Big Design’? The debate continues.

N.

Nigel Green

5Di Ltd.
Mobile: +44 (0)7818  53 22 43
Sent from my iPad

Permalink

| Leave a comment  »

Categories Uncategorized

Great conversations on enterprise-architecture

A busy week this has been. The Gartner EA Summit and the Open Group Enterprise Architecture Practitioners conference were both on in London at the same time, little more than a few hundred yards apart. And a lot of other things starting to happen in the enterprise scene as well: more good news on the […]

Power of EA + BPM: Thoughts from Gartner EA Summit

The Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit in London came to a close yesterday.  After two days of insightful keynotes, analyst presentations, workshops and networking, it was clear that business processes and EA are inherently and necessarily linked to one another.  In a recent Gartner survey, improving and aligning business processes was cited as an EA priority […]

Related posts:

  1. Thoughts from Gartner BPM Summit Gartner Business Process Management Summit is in full swing and…
  2. Must See Guide for Gartner BPM Summit As one of the largest BPM conferences in the world,…
  3. Metastorm ProVision positioned as a Leader in new Gartner Magic Quadrant for BPA tools Today Metastorm announced that it has been positioned in the…

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A week in Tweets: 17-23 April 2011

Still in catch-up, as seems to occur all too often – apologies. Another week’s-worth of Tweets and links, anyway. Usual categories, of course, after the usual ‘Read more…’ link.

Enterprise-architecture, business-architecture, business-strategy and suchlike:

jdevoo: RT @jpertusa: Fascinating! TED: Repository of open source hardware for development http://bit.ly/fywYGn #sustainability #entarch
JohnPolgreen: RT @pbmobi: real architecture=something where there was an […]