Common Denominator: Business First!

I am working with a couple different clients now on their approach to enterprise architecture, and not surprisingly, their approaches are vastly different.

One company has a core group of EA’s, working primarily on what they have named Business Driven Target Architecture, which is a bit of a mix of business, application and data architecture.  The scope of these ranges from very project-specific to business-unit wide.  In addition to this work, they have other efforts underway to cross-reference their primary work with each other, company and division strategies and trends in business and technology.  While their primary work is very solutions oriented, their secondary work is enterprise-wide and will, over time, provide more enterprise views of the business and application landscapes.  There is another group that is focused on the technology architecture. 

The second client also has two groups working on EA. The first group has been in existence for a few years and is an internal IT group, headed by the full-time Chief Architect, with several architects acting in a part-time EA/part-time solutions architect capacity.  The Chief Architect leads the IT architecture effort with internal IT resources , but also is a member of the second group.  The second group is composed of a variety of business and IT representatives, with a focus on business architecture and strategy.  Without the second group, the internal IT group has struggled  to gain the traction necessary for EA to be more effective.  The second group is just getting started, but they are already beginning to see more support, especially given the stature of business architecture group’s members and the vocal support of the company’s chief executive.

While these two companies are approaching EA very differently, they both have one very important characteristic in common: They both have a “Business First” approach.  The first company starts their Business Driven Target Architectures (notice the First word in the name of their approach) with an understanding of the business goals and strategies, pain points, processes and business capability changes.  That is what separates it from a straightforward solutions architecture approach, in addition to the cross-referencing to their secondary work.

The first company, after struggling with traction, also decided there needed to be more of a business first sense to their efforts.  So they not only created a Business Architecture Team (there is that word first again), but they also focused the group on defining a holistic business operating model as the context for many of the business process integration and business process standardization (see my earlier post that describes their approach) recommendations.

Both of these companies will continue to modify their EA approach as necessary, but one thing will remain constant: Business First!

Enterprise Architects as Change Agents

Last week I read a blog post by Rosabeth Moss Katner talking about Leadership and seven sayings that can guide and comfort those trying to drive change.  It was a good post and I tweeted it along with the comment “good advice for enterprise architects and other change agents”.   Since we began our interest in EA, Tim and I have embraced the slogan that “Enterprise Architects are Change Agents” and have used it as a theme when coaching and teaching. 

Lately, though, it seems that many EA practitioners don’t understand what the concept of “change agent” is all about and/or how to make it real, or are comfortable or constrained to only work on change at the micro (project, product, system, etc.) level vs. the enterprise level.  I wanted to take this opportunity to reinforce the concept that being an effective enterprise architect often means acting as an agent to drive large-scale change into your culture, influencing larger communities of people to engage, interact and make decisions in a non-local, non-micro “enterprise” way. 

The quotes Ms. Katner’s selected for her blog post are from herself and also from various literary and historical figures.  They are spot on and highly relevant to the EA community, specifically as applied to our role as leaders and change agents.  Some examples:

The quote from the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland that “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there” speaks directly to the main focus of our work. Creating a coherent (and “business first” – see Tim’s accompanying post) future state enterprise architecture becomes the target that all paths must lead to.  Engaging leadership in discussions about the substance and form of that future state is the key to success here – finding the context and the opportunity is the tactic and there are many possible approaches.

The quote from Yogi Berra that “when you come to a fork in the road, take it” implies that we as enterprise architects sometimes must “stir the pot” and experiment, to not be afraid to float ideas before they are fully baked and see where they lead.  The fear of making mistakes is often so intrinsic that it paralyzes many of the EA teams that we have helped over the years.   Today, with internal social networking, many organizations now have vehicles where open, lower-risk exploration and trial-ballooning can occur.

Becoming an EA cultural change agent isn’t for everyone, but many reluctant practitioners have discovered that they are capable of doing it, once they embrace some of the concepts described here, practice them, and become confident in their abilities.

EA and SOA Revisited

There has been a lot of discussion recently on online forums, phone calls and visits with clients and prospects, and in the analyst community about the relationship between enterprise architecture and service-oriented architecture … again.

Three years ago EAdirections did a webinar with David Linthicum entitled “When EA and SOA Worlds Collide.”  (Both the presentation and webinar recording are available.)  I was recently asked to revisit that presentation with a client for one of their internal meetings as they just got internal approval to implement an ESB as part of their SOA strategy.  Based on the recent activity, both within and outside my own conversations, it seems that not a lot has changed in these three years. 

We have always positioned SOA as one of the modes of architecture and development that an EA should include, but it is not the entirety of EA.  You are still going to have batch feeds and other non-service-oriented modes of systems integration and development.  While there has been an increase in the implementation of SOA and the maturity of EA functions, it seems as though the main disconnect that we pointed out in our webinar still exists – Multiple SOA projects going on without being part of an enterprise SOA plan.  There are a variety of different reasons for this, but to me, it boils down to the lack of an answer to 2 fundamental questions from a holistic perspective:  What services should we build?  Who will use them?

In order to answer this question, the scope of analysis must be not only beyond the project level, but beyond the IT perspective.  Enterprises need to have a better idea of how they are going to operate, where the opportunities for redundant service delivery are, and where integration should be implemented among its current and future business processes.  Business architecture is the key to figuring out the answers to these questions.

So I guess I misspoke (typed) earlier when I said nothing has changed.  There has been one very big change in the three years since we did that webinar – business architecture has left the realm of possibility and potential and is positioned to actually help some organizations be more successful with SOA, as well as other modes of architecture within the overall EA.

Reminder – Join us at IASA World Summit NY for “Variations on the Architecture Theme”

In a Keynote Presentation at the upcoming IASA World Summit 2010, September 22-24 in New York, Tim Westbrock and George Paras will be sharing ideas and leading a discussion on the dynamics that exist between the roles of Solutions, IT, and Enterprise Architects, what they mean to your enterprise, and what they mean to practitioners and IT leaders.  We hope you can join us.

Abstract: Most organizations that claim to be practicing “enterprise” architecture are really just doing “IT” architecture (ITA), and many of those are primarily focused on “solution” architecture.  If they are all “architecture”, do the distinctions matter?  Absolutely! And all these variations of “architecture” are important.  Our research and client observations reveal that most organizations do not have clarity on how to leverage these roles or even how to set expectations and measure their contributions.  For an organization to extract the highest value from architecture, and for the practitioners to get the most satisfaction and rewards for their work, it is critical that the stakeholders understand the differences.  It is also imperative that the organization learn that all these roles must exist and that they must work together to achieve the organization’s objectives.         

Topics will include:

• The key characteristics of EA, ITA and Solutions Architect roles and practices
• Leveraging your Solutions Architecture and ITA work to move up to holistic EA – preparing yourself for your next leap
• Moving from the Traditional to the Transformational View of EA to lead true business transformation
• Getting Started with Business Architecture and Strategic Capabilities Analysis as part of EA
• Tips on what to do if your organization does not yet have an EA or ITA practice
• The personal skills required for each role, and how to move from one to another

If you’d like to contact us and arrange a time to meet at the event, please us the form below:

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Updated Registration Info – EAdirections speaking at AOGEA Collaboration Event in Southfield, MI

UPDATE: It is still not too late to join us at this multidisciplinary event in Michigan.   A Registration Site is now available with full event details and information on how to register.  Allen Brown, CEO and President of The Open Group will be delivering the opening keynote presentation.  If you have any questions, or would just like to chat before the event or on-site, drop us a note via the attached form.

George Paras and Tim Westbrock are scheduled to speak at the upcoming Collaboration Event sponsored by the AOGEA Michigan Chapter (Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects) on September 16, 2010 from 2:00 PM to 7:00 PM at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, MI.  The theme of the event is “Interoperability between various disciplines in an enterprise”.

In our session titled, “Don’t Call It EA if It Isn’t EA!: Holistic EA for a Tightly Integrated Enterprise” we’ll be discussing the dynamics of Enterprise Architecture as it evolves from an IT-oriented discipline into a necessary part of a compelling and successful business transformation effort.

This event is a collaboration between the AOGEA Michigan Chapter and the ABPMP SE Michigan Chapter (The Association of Business Process Management), itSMF Great Lakes Chapter (Information Technology Service Management Forum), and the SE Michigan IIBA Chapter (International Institute of Business Analysis).

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