Top 10 Things an EA Should Be Thinking About (Part 2)

A couple of months ago, we published part 1 of Top 10 Things an EA Should Be Thinking About.  Now we add a few more, with considerations for the New Year.  To get started, I will repeat what we said in part 1 as the means of introduction…

…Our list represents the Top Ten (or so) things that we think true Enterprise Architects should be thinking about.  As always, this represents our thinking that Enterprise Architects should be focused on the whole of the enterprise, business and IT perspectives, long-term business strategy and transformation, and the impact that has on the work that needs to be done beyond the here and now.  Not the kinds of things that solution architects, data architects, application architects, infrastructure architects, or security architects should be thinking about – What should ENTERPRISE architects be thinking about?

Not listed in order of importance – they are all important.  Also, we would like to tell you that a typical IT-centric Enterprise Architect may not be able to answer these questions or think about them as completely as they should – in which case, they need to seek out the appropriate business and/or IT professionals to discuss these topics with from the perspective of their enterprise.

6.  With increasingly creative business partnerships forming in the marketplace, how can we effectively share information and collaborate with partners while protecting business confidentiality and adhering to regulatory concerns.  Are there general rules we should develop?  This is a dilemma of the new century.  The types of partnerships forming between suppliers and buyers, between former and even current competitors, between public entities and constituents, and between producers and consumers are primarily being created to share/consume information rather than products and services.  Another factor to consider is the element of trust, as the use of information outside the enterprise boundaries may be impossible to monitor and control. 

7.  As increasing amounts of information about customers, markets, transactions, sensor status, etc. flow into our company, are we able to effectively analyze that information to increase profits and/or value to our constituents?  Can we handle it, manage it, store it, protect it, etc.?  Which work processes must change or be invented to operate in the new environment?   The amount and size of data are increasing at a tremendous rate for most companies.  While the hardware to move, secure and store this data is an issue in and of itself, the more pressing issue is how to utilize the information to your enterprise’s benefit.  The focus needs to be on the information consumers.  Who can use the information to support their work activities and/or decision making processes?

8.  How does our enterprise “measure” or represent value?  What are the most important factors of success to our executive leaders?  Are they being measured?  How can EA facilitate the achievement of those success factors?  We are often asked how to measure the value of EA.  Short answer: Measuring EA’s value is dependent on the measurement of value in other activities influenced by EA, and most organizations are not mature enough in their general performance management capabilities to support the ability to measure the value of EA.  So the workaround is to figure out how EA can enable those factors that are most important to executives and show the indirect linkage that EA has to contributing value.  But it all starts with understanding what your executives value.

9.  With the current aggressive pace of marketplace and technology change, have we made the right decisions to be nimble enough to respond ahead of our competitors?  How important is agility to the business and are we prepared to be innovative?  How can I make the enterprise understand the need for adaptability?  This is not a NEW question, by the way, as those of you who have followed us for the last 15 years know.  But as time goes by and these paces continue to accelerate, these questions become even more important…as we have been saying for the last 15 years.

10. Where are the decision-making bodies and processes disconnected in our enterprise?  And once you identify them, how can you create a visualization of these broken chains?  EA is part of the planning and decision making ecosystem of your enterprise.  Influencing decisions and plans for investments and implementations is the outcome of a well functioning EA program.  In order to do this effectively, you need to identify where to influence these decisions and convince executive leadership that EA has a place in the process.

We would love to hear what are readers are thinking about in 2011.  Please share with your comments.

Improving EA Team Performance

With the arrival of the New Year, many EA teams are in the final stages of setting their annual objectives.  This year, we find that many are being asked to perform at a level significantly higher than last year.   They must do so in response to higher expectations placed on them by leaders who believe that EA plays a critical role in moving the enterprise into the future.  

Many annual objectives documents are primarly structured as lists of projects  and deliverables that the team must complete in the next planning period.   While hard deliverables are necessary and expected, every EA leader should also consider adding objectives designed to improve team performance and to address “how” the team is going to accomplish their assignments.   Why?  Because EA success requires predictable and consistent performance by the team as a whole and by its individual members.

One of the most interesting observations from studies of EA team performance is that the typical team profile of a collection of highly skilled and specialized individual contributors isn’t necessarily optimal.  To be successful, teams populated that way must learn to function as a team, supplementing the natural tendency for individuals to work alone.  Enterprise architecture is inherently cross-domain in scope.  Only by working in collaboration across domain specialites will the team be able to quickly address the many dependencies that are part of the modern enterprise.   

We recommend that EA leaders employ the following techniques when striving to improve their overall team performance:   

Develop a common language: Words and concepts are important.  Adopt/adapt a “language of EA” that makes sense for your organization.  A common grounding in EA core concepts can go a long way to unifying a team.  Look to the more widely used and common industry approaches to EA, take a class, or ask us.  We’re happy to make recommendations on practical approaches that will work, and show you how to adapt them to your needs.

Be a Team: Get together frequently, in person and/or virtually.  Eschew “project status reporting” meetings in favor of strategic discussions, cross-domain issues resolution, trend analysis and healthy debate.

Collaborate and Communicate: Actively recruit and engage external parties and bring them into the discussion.  Learn to exploit “social media” style connections to engage with these larger audiences. 

Learn to Lead: EA is a “lead through influence” discipline.  Take a leadership course, but be careful to select one focused on “soft” leadership styles.  It isn’t about traditional personnel management techniques.

With people as the critical element to EA success; it only makes sense to invest in team skills and performance.   Unfortunately, many teams put disproportionate emphasis on templates, frameworks and deliverables.  Make it a practice to visit/revisit the health and productivity of the team.  Don’t wait until next January to start.

Better or Different? An Argument for Adaptability

As a primary direction to create and sustain competitive advantage, some executives have decided it is more important to be different, than better. This is not to say that there is no consideration for operational efficiency, only that it is not the primary driver for many companies seeking sustainable competitive advantage.  Many market leaders separate themselves from their competition by operating differently, offering different services, delivering via different channels, providing different information or producing different products.  Because success breeds imitation, many competitors will change also, eliminating the differentiating factors.  In order to sustain their advantage, companies must differentiate themselves again and force the market in which they compete to continually react to their changes.   Consequently, executives of competitive differentiator companies understand the need for an adaptive environment and have enabled corporate agility with an adaptive enterprise architecture (EA) strategy.

What is Competitive Differentiation? Companies with a differentiation strategy strive to provide uniqueness in their industry along dimensions that are widely valued by buyers.  They position themselves to provide one or more needs that buyers perceive as important that is different from the competitors in their industry or a specific focus within that market.  Differentiation can be presented through a product or service itself, the channels through which the product or service is provided, marketing, procurement and other factors.  Each industry has its own factors for differentiation.

Competitive differentiation strategies require faster than average business process change and high demand for information access, both requirements for an adaptive EA.  For instance, one market leader has an internal metric for measuring its business process change rate — with a goal of once every 6 months.  This compares to the average of once every 12-18 months for other fast-change organizations.  This company, like others engaged in competitive differentiation, has placed a high priority on developing an adaptive EA to facilitate this degree of rapid change.  The need for information access is derived from the requirement for faster decision making among hyper-competitive organizations.  Providing access to the right information to the right people at the right time becomes a key architectural requirement.

The key linkage between the business and enterprise architecture is the identification of the fast-change business capability changes and the parallel business information capability changes affected by the competitive differentiation strategies.  Not all processes are affected as dramatically as others by differentiation.  For example, a manufacturer that is differentiating itself through multiple distribution channels is more likely to have fast-change within the processes that interact with distributors and customers, rather than its internal manufacturing process.  This change will also impact the type and amount of information that is shared between the manufacturer, distributors and customers.  Likewise a manufacturer striving for competitive advantage through product differentiation would impact engineering, design and manufacturing processes more than customer service, accounting and billing, while increasing the amount of information sharing necessary between product designers, engineers and the manufacturing floor.  The impact of these fast-change strategic capability changes on EA is that they become the basis for the common set of drivers which the business and the IT organization agree to pursue with their EA.

Is your company pursuing competitive differentiation?  How is that effecting your EA plans?

EAdirections’ Views on Business Architecture at Troux Worldwide Conference

Tim Westbrock will be sharing his views on Business Architecture with attendees at the upcoming Troux Worldwide Conference in Austin on March 23rd and 24th.  For those able to attend, you will be intrigued by Tim’s perspectives on Enterprise Architecture as it is commonly practiced today and on his thoughts on how the discipline of EA is fundamentally altered by the addition of business architecture practices.

George Paras will also be in attendance, serving as Master of Ceremonies for the event in his role as Editor-in-Chief of Architecture and Governance Magazine, the event’s main media sponsor.

We both look forward to the opportunity to meet with our subscribers and blog readers while in Austin.  If you plan to attend,  please contact us ahead of time and we’ll be happy to arrange for a time to meet, or just be sure to come up and say hello at the event.  

Here are some more details:

The Troux Worldwide Conference is a must attend conference for companies involved in Strategic IT Planning and Enterprise Architecture (EA) programs. Set for March 23-24, 2011 in Austin, Texas and sponsored by Architecture and Governance Magazine, the conference will include some cutting edge case studies from some of the most innovative and successful companies in the industry.

This is your chance to hear the latest on how to make your EA programs sing with success and most importantly – deliver value!

The Troux Worldwide User Conference is also a great opportunity to network face-to-face with your peers and industry thought leaders. For more information and to request your invitation, please visit www.troux.com/conference