This week, the lessons revolve around launching the initiative of the EA structure. In the text, chapter 4 deals with the various EA stages, and how to develop your infrastructure from one phase to the next.
Ross lists the four stages of architecture maturity as business silos architecture, standardized technology architecture, optimized core architecture, and business modularity architecture (Ross 71). At a glance, the business silos stage consists of companies focusing their IT resources on local problems or opportunities (Ross 72). A company would, naturally, align their IT resources to match the company's best interests. However, at this stage the infrastructure only supports local issues. Stage 2, or standardized technology, typically deals with companies shifting these resources from local to global applications. By mandating a process of some sort, there is a minor shift in philosophy from reactive to proactive, whereby resources focus on global problems and solutions. The optimized core focuses on moving from problem solving to an "enterprise view" (Ross 76). This pertains more to EA upkeep, where staff spend time managing data, deleting redundancies, etc. The end goal is to achieve the goals of the company by making use of reusable data. Finally, business modularity refines the optimized core through repeatable modules. This improves strategic agility, as process that were developed in the third stage are further refined (Ross 78).
Chapter 5 deals with typical outcomes of companies moving up from stage 1 through stage 4. At a high level, IT is more responsive, less averse to risk, better satisfies management, and enhances business outcomes (Ross 96-100). All these outcomes boil down to improved perceived value from company stakeholders, which seemed to be a big talking point during last week's lesson. I've certainly witnessed firsthand that the more advanced an IT infrastructure is, the more it is able to accomplish and satisfy senior management. This could mean bigger budgets and less tension between IT and the rest of the company.
Another interesting topic this week was Garter's paper on psychology and its role within EA. He agrees that since EA is largely about designing change, people must see value in the change as well as the value exceeding the costs of the change. (Garter 4-5).
" All these outcomes boil down to improved perceived value from company stakeholders, which seemed to be a big talking point during last week's lesson."
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more. So many times I've seen excellent technology unappreciated or misused due to lack of buy-in from its organizational stakeholders. I know, I know, I'm letting my IT bias show a little bit here. If good technology is used improperly or otherwise adopted, it's probably not good technology for that use case or circumstance.
Good EA takes into account stake holder and subject matter expert feedback. But once the decision is made by the executive team, the org must be in lockstep.
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ReplyDeleteAgreed. The challenge in bottom-up stakeholder buy-in is when the organization is extremely large. The messaging in itself becomes a challenge in distribution and the EA focus is diluted when the perception becomes perceived as an Ivory Tower initiative.
DeleteI see this in my organization of 70,000 personnel with an annual budget of $30 billion. The EA initiatives come down in fragments and barely recognizable from the overall vision. A large organization gets so complacent in the amount of current status documentation that in some cases, junior EA technicians only know EA as a practice in documentation because that is ALL they have been doing.
Another problem with achieving stakeholder buy-in with larger organizations is that personnel do not get the overall vision because of the size of the portion of the framework that they manage makes it harder to see the forest from the trees.
I share Alfredo's viewpoint in how a very large organization can have challenges "connecting the dots" on the value of EA. Even though I work in an organization where vision and strategy are consistently articulated to the rank and file employees, the value proposition of incremental changes that stem from EA are ignored or not communicated. While time consuming, these instances are opportunities for the EA team to communicate how EA is helping.
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