EA872 - Weekly Blog Entry 9

This week, we ask ourselves about leadership:  what is the leadership agenda for creating and leveraging a foundation for execution?  (Ross 188).  The text goes back to Chapter 1, where we listed nine common symptoms of an ineffective foundation; from there, it describes key ways to rethink an organization to mitigate (or hopefully completely remove) these symptoms.

1. One Customer Question Elicits Different Answers.
2. New Regulations Require major Effort.
3. Business Agility is Difficult and Growth Initiatives Aren't Profitable
4. IT is Consistently a Bottleneck
5. Different Business Processes and Systems Complete the Same Activity
6. Information Necessary for Making Decisions is Not Available
7. Employees Move Data from one System to Another
8. Senior Management Dreads Discussing IT Agenda Items
9. Management Doesn't Know Whether it Gets Good Value from IT

Each lesson over the course of this semester will help improve a company's architecture - everything from analyzing the existing infrastructure to designing the new model, and growing it horizontally or vertically.  But at the end of the day, it is up to leadership to facilitate the change.  The top ten leadership principles to achieve this are as follows (Ross 206):

1. Commit to the Foundation
2. Initiate Change from the Top and Remove Barriers
3. Feed the Core - Experiment
4. Use Architecture as a Compass and Communication Tool
5. Don't Skip Stages
6. Implement the Foundation One Project at a Time
7. Don't Do it Alone - Outsource
8. Invest in Your People
9. Reward Enterprisewide Thinking
10. Empower Employees with the Foundation for Execution