Things EA’s Should Think About – External Collaboration

One of the many interesting outcomes of today’s business climate is the increasing variety of new business partnerships. Traditional boundaries between organizations are giving way to innovative and creative relationships, driven by a combination of necessity and opportunity. Cross-company information exchange and collaboration is the central success component.

Organizations are discovering that there is often more to implementing these partnerships than is apparent at the outset, and the issues multiply with each new relationship. For example, “How can we effectively share information and collaborate with partners while protecting business confidentiality and adhering to regulatory concerns”? Those are just two among many important considerations. Issues intrinsic to external collaboration have far-reaching implications. Identifying and addressing them is tailor-made to the broad, cross-enterprise, cross-domain perspective and analyses that an EA group can bring to the table.

Many organizations are discovering that the volume of requests to share information is increasing with each new business partnership, as is the type of information exchanged. Increasingly, they are seeing demand for bi-directional collaborative interactions, in near real-time, and with a frequency that makes it difficult to respond in time to address the market opportunity. Furthermore, these collaboration requirements are contextual and don’t always fit into a standardized approach. Not only will different companies have different needs, but it is likely that there will be many different models even within a single company based on the type of partnership and the participating departments. Some cross-organization collaborative examples we have seen include legal negotiations, multi-company engineering activities, resource scheduling /provisioning, joint marketing initiatives, barter arrangements that include trading excess production capacity for a right to access an organization’s client base in a foreign market, and many other variations.

It is likely that a single standard solution cannot address the full range of scenarios an organization might encounter. The EA group should work to raise the visibility of the most pertinent issues. They should guide the creation of a general framework, including a set of rules, principles and approaches that can address them. Here are just a few of the questions organizations we work with are beginning to ask:

• What is the business vision for partnerships? How will they grow and evolve? Where do they fit in our overall enterprise model? Which business processes, business functions and information areas are involved? What is the business value to enabling these partnerships?
• What confidentiality, proprietary, legal and regulatory issues are relevant? What other business risks are in play?
• What patterns of external collaboration exist with potential partners? Are there standardized business patterns and collaboration models that will broadly satisfy business need?
• How should external collaboration integrate with our own internal collaboration models and enabling infrastructure? Should it? Do we grant access to external parties?
• How do we protect our proprietary and confidential information from being intentionally or accidentally passed on to other parties? How do we protect theirs? Do we restrict unauthorized copying? Do we lock access, encrypt, etc.?
• How do we address different data definitions, data security zones, data classifications, etc.?
• How do we ensure timely and scheduled updates to our partners? How do we alert each other to changes? How do we ensure partners are not working with expired information?
• Etc.

So, what should enterprise architects do? Get ahead of the conversation, not so much that you get tuned out, but enough that you begin asking the right questions to gauge the enterprise need. Use a multi-pronged communications approach to get the conversation started with business leaders, IT leaders, your own team and other stakeholders. Techniques can include individual discussions, facilitated sessions, and internal social media postings. Once you get a sense for the appetite of the enterprise you may see traction develop. Begin to create hard artifacts for discussion; capabilities analysis first, then principles, then iteratively build increasingly detailed models, specifically business architecture models. Remember that, at any time, you may get too far ahead for anyone to care. You can always park your work and come back to revisit later.

External collaboration is just one of the many questions that enterprise architects might want to think about in the next year. A proactive EA group’s role is to be thinking about high impact, enterprise-wide constructs at least in enough detail to have an appreciation for the issues, the scope and scale of possible approaches. Doing so will inform the organization enough to make the proper decisions when time becomes the critical constraint.

EA Activity Catalog

If an enterprise architecture team tries to be everything to everybody, at all possible levels of detail, at every point in time, it will fail.  The result will be that it doesn’t do anything for anybody, which would be unfortunate.  When it works, EA can have a significant impact on the quality, consistency, and speed of decision-making.

How can you avoid the inevitable overload and the misunderstood expectations?  Every great enterprise architecture team I know constantly examines the work it is doing in the context of the resources it has available, the number of hours available each day, the objectives it must meet and the expectations of its stakeholders.  In addition, the leaders appreciate that EA teams evolve over time and adjust to the changing needs of their business.  The key is to know which activities they must perform, how many at a time, how frequently and in what order.  The attached presentation is a starting point to understand the range of activities you COULD do.  The challenge is to determine which of these you CAN and SHOULD do.

Let the Budgeting Process Begin – EA’s Role

As the annual corporate budgeting season begins, we find ourselves again fielding client inquiries about the role that EA should play in this annual rite.  Like many such EA best practice questions, there is the EA purist answer and then there are the many variations of more practical answers.   

In an ideal world, enterprise architecture should have little to do directly with the annual budgeting process, per se, but instead be feeding the portfolio planning process.  We “inform” that process, which should be complete before the budgeting process begins.  The analysis of strategy and business capabilities enables the creation of a holistic enterprise architecture future state, and the comparison to current state charts a forward-looking roadmap and transition strategies.  That work provides the list of potential major investments, supplementing the list of projects that is the typical starting point for the investment process.  The budgeting process systematically transforms that list of “potential” investments into those that can be achieved in the next planning cycle based on available funds, resources, risks and business priorities.   EA’s role is to impartially analyze the list of potential investments and guide the organization through the implications of various scenarios.

From a practical standpoint the reality is rarely that straightforward.  For example, there often isn’t a portfolio planning process distinct from the budgeting process.  What the organization can afford, therefore, is a dominant constraint before strategic or even tactical outcome can be thoroughly analyzed.  The EA team must never be arm’s-length if our mission is to impact the choice of projects and guide the evolution toward the desired future state.  

Another reality is that, in many organizations, the future state is rarely well-formed.  As such, most EA teams must leverage the opportunities provided by projects already on the list.    Being active in the budgeting process is a fail-safe to learn about business opportunities they might not have seen, to gain new insights into the priorities of the organization, and to discover paths that will help bring potential future states into focus.

There are other answers to the EA role in budgeting question as well, not the least of which is dealing with management expectations.  How far enterprise architects should engage, and at what level, is situational and we’d be happy to discuss offline with anyone that is interested. 

Remember, EA should not be constrained by the list of funded projects but should focus on reconciling long and short-term interests.  We should never confuse or stifle the “out of the box” thinking that EA should provide with the realities of short-term investment and implementation decisions.  EA involvement in the budgeting process is probably too late in the overall investment decision-making continuum, but it can be a good place for the EA team to ask the questions that would demonstrate the need for more proactive and broader planning in the future.

EA Value Contribution

What value does the EA function provide to the enterprise?  That question consistently ranks in the top ten list of most frequently asked EA questions.  The question, unfortunately, doesn’t lend itself to a simple answer.  It is more often a matter of value being in ”the eye of the beholder”.   In other words, the answer to the question depends on who is asking and what answer they expect to hear based on their personal and professional interpretation of the word “value”.

A systematic, multi-part approach to addressing the value question can lend clarity.  By classifying the various ways that EA groups contribute value, and identifying the stakeholder communities and how they align themselves with those classifications,  each organization can address the value question in terms that are meaningful to their particular stakeholder mix.  In our experience every organization always has multiple value expectations. 

The weighting among various value contributors differentiates one organization from the next.  The weightings will change as the EA function grows and evolves.  To begin to answer the value question, lets define three possible value contribution classes.  These are focused not on what an EA function is, but on what it does for the enterprise:

Project Support:  In some organizations, value is defined exclusively by an individual’s direct contribution to the completion of project-oriented tasks.  While one can argue as to what proportion of individual EA team member’s time is directly or indirectly linked to project tasks, and it will vary by role, skill set and EA maturity, in the aggregate every EA team interested in long-term survival must make their contribution to project completion visible.  After all, it is the rare organization that doesn’t perceive “getting things done” as the highest value component.  As EA teams evolve, contribution to project success will become less hands-on, design-oriented and become more “guidance” oriented as the EA team uses its collective insight into the future state and roadmaps to inform project activities.  In these cases, getting things done “right”, in consideration of both project and enterprise requirements, becomes the operative value contribution.

Strategic Direction: The “raison d’être” of an EA group is to understand the strategic direction of the organization and capture it into a future state representation that reflects the eventual achievement of that direction.  For leaders that believe in EA, their expectation is that the EA organization will invest resources in creation of go-forward standards, patterns, platforms, models and other representations.  After all, an EA team cannot effectively and efficiently perform their “support projects” value contribution if they don’t have a basis to use in providing guidance.  Therefore, creating useable and prescriptive future state guidance, and communicating those directions to the project and asset communities, is a key value contribution that must be included in the mix.

Portfolio Transformation:  It is a rare organization, indeed, that doesn’t suffer from the accumulation of past incremental additions to its asset portfolios (technology, solutions, information, etc.).  Each addition was, at the time, fully justified and sensible in the context of the problem they were trying to solve.  Only upon retrospective analysis does an organization discover the burden those portfolios place upon them in the form of cost, resources, or inflexibility.  Given the future state holistic perspective defined by an EA function, a significant value contribution of EA is to help guide portfolio transformations to shed excess or duplicate components and bring them into alignment with the go-forward wishes of the organization.

By analyzing how the EA function can contribute in each of these categories, and by thoroughly understanding the expectations of stakeholder communities in each, the EA team can strike a balance that will satisfy itself that it is doing the right things, and demonstrate it to leadership as well.

George Paras speaks on “Enterprise Alignment through Enterprise Architecture and Governance”

I am pleased to have been invited to join Ronald Ross, Roger Burlton and many other noted speakers to present at this year’s Business Rules Forum at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas.  I will be presenting on Monday, November 2 during the all-day Business Alignment Symposium and also participating in a panel discussion with the rest of the Symposium faculty at the end of the day.

Use Special Code 9SPGP when you REGISTER to receive a 10% discount!

Title: “Enterprise Alignment through Enterprise Architecture and Governance” 

Achieving ambitious, large scale enterprise transformation demands unique competencies and perspectives, different from those required for day-to-day project execution and operations.  It requires an enterprise view of alignment, bridging big-picture strategy consistently into hundreds of smaller scale implementation and operational decisions.    Enterprise Architecture (EA) and effective Governance are two of those critical competencies.  This session will explore the techniques and approaches that leading organizations use to institutionalize these core management disciplines, reaching beyond the IT department to create a true partnership with business leadership. 

• How to sort out competing Business, IT and EA priorities
• Perspectives: Strategic vs. Tactical, Enterprise vs. Project, Process vs. Content
• The Enterprise View – Capabilities, Portfolios and Roadmaps
• Alignment deliverables for the executive and models for EA consumer
• The human challenge – Culture, People, Persuasion, Roles, Responsibilities

George Paras – SITPforum in Minneapolis

I will be visiting Minneapolis on August 19 as the guest speaker at the SITPforum.  This is an interactive, executive round-table session beginning with refreshments at 4 PM.  I’ll be leading a discussion on “Aligning Business and IT” with a focus on IT Strategic Planning, EA and Portfolio Management with side discussions on any aspect of those topics of interest to the group.  At previous sessions in Atlanta and New York I touched on Governance, Organizational Models, Business and Information Architecture, Capabilities Analysis, and how to be an effective IT Leader.

If you can’t attend but know someone in the area, please forward this announcement to them. 

Please send an email directly to me at gparas@EAdirections.com if you’d like to attend.  I look forward to seeing you there.