Too Much Tactical Focus with Business Architecture?

As more and more organizations embrace Enterprise Architecture with a concerted effort in Business Architecture (BA),. we are beginning to see one of the common pitfalls of IT Architecture (ITA) spill over — too much focus on the tactical, project level.  Apparently, getting business representatives involved in applying EA discipline to the business architecture does not mean that the effort will remain high level, strategic and forward thinking.  Just like many ITA efforts, BA efforts result in the identification of work that needs to be done to support the enterprise’s transformation.  And also like many ITA efforts, once the resulting work is started, many of the BA participants find themselves involved in the transformation effort.  Another factor that needs to be considered is the lack of dedicated BA resources, such as a Chief Architect or Business Architect or BA team.  The BA efforts are usually staffed entirely by a virtual team, all of whom have real, demanding full-time jobs.

If you are trying to avoid an overly tactical focus for your BA efforts, here are some suggestions to consider:

• Dedicated BA Resource.  A dedicated resource, not assigned to specific BA initiatives, but also not holding a full-time non-BA position is probably not feasible in many organizations.  However, those going through significant transformation efforts could easily justify a resource to keep pushing the transformation agenda, overseeing the BA initiatives, maintaining a focus on future change, and organizing and managing the BA virtual team.  If a full-time dedicated resource is not feasible, consider finding a leader who can dedicate some time to the effort, 25-40% minimum, while not getting deeply involved in individual BA initiatives.
• Strategic Agenda Items for Regular Meetings.  Most BA groups have regularly scheduled meetings, weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, etc.  By having every third or fourth meeting focused on new strategies, new technologies, new changes, rather than ongoing initiatives; the group will still be able to push the transformation work forward, while also continuing to architect the future business.  Another alternative is to always have at least one agenda item that is of a strategic, future oriented topic at each meeting.
• Maintain a Portfolio vs. a Project Perspective.  Rather than providing oversight to individual projects and implementation initiatives, focus on providing input to the investment decision-making function(s) of the enterprise, and track the overall portfolio’s progress against expected strategic outcomes.  Leave the cost, budget, resource, and schedule issues to the project management staff.

All of these suggestions are not new.  They are the same kind of actions that successful ITA groups have been employing to maintain a strategic perspective for years.

EA Tips – Style AND Substance

For an EA practice to be effective EA leaders must pay attention to both the “style” of how their team operates and the “substance” of the work they produce. While that guidance isn’t new, in practice I often find that many leaders don’t have the balance quite right. It is worth revisiting as a general EA Tip.

First, what do I mean by “style” and by ‘substance”? (note: I chose those words because it sounded like a catchy blog title) For the sake of this article, I define “substance” to be the “work product” of the team as viewed by EA consumers wanting hard deliverables like frameworks, models, standards, roadmaps, strategy papers, and other related content. “Style” refers to “how” the team works with the rest of the organization in creating and utilizing their content: engaging business and IT leadership, fostering a collaborative environment; choosing communications vehicles, the words they use, and the “posture” of how they present themselves to the rest of the organization.

Many EA teams disproportionately direct more effort to the substance of the work than to building a sense of ownership and socializing the desired changes. In essence, they under serve the “style” elements. Granted, substance is critical. No matter how good the soft skills are or how convincing the leaders are, if the content isn’t solid then nobody will follow. But what is more surprising to many teams is that even the most elegant and perfect deliverables often don’t have impact. Why? – Because the team hasn’t positioned the larger workforce to embrace enterprise architecture content and to use it in their day to day work.

Improving the EA team’s style is often where we spend time with clients, specifically working on the “art” of practicing EA. Though many EA’s wish there was a methodological approach to these softer elements, there really isn’t one that works in all cases. People, perspectives, culture, and individual skills vary widely from organization to organization. One approach is to look to lessons learned from the organizational change management discipline, particularly as they apply to driving change across and down into an organization. There are tried and true techniques for preparing organizations for change, conducting education and awareness campaigns, gaining support and participation, and communicating effectively through a variety of different channels. After all, one of the valuable outcomes from EA is helping an organization move from an emphasis on tactical execution and silo behaviors to one that includes a larger, enterprise-wide strategic element. Substance is great, but style really does matter.

EA Tips – Substance OVER Structure

If you read my post on “Style AND Substance” I stated that an EA team shouldn’t spend disproportionate energy on content creation without also paying attention to the many softer, stylistic elements associated with leadership and influence. One without the other and the team will fail. In this “EA Tips” post on “substance vs. structure” I offer that an EA leader should worry only slightly about organization and team structural issues and spend as many cycles as possible jump starting the EA team and getting them to work together to produce meaningful content (strategies, standards, roadmaps, etc.).

Every EA team I work with these days is overloaded. I believe that much of the time spent worrying about structure and organization is time better spent elsewhere. Yes, I know that there are just some HR issues that must be addressed, team members need job descriptions and performance plans, and frankly most people won’t even join a team unless they have a reasonable understanding of their responsibilities and how performance will be recognized.

Beyond that, though, I find that many leaders find themselves slicing and dicing roles too finely and creating a lot of unnecessary work for themselves. In fact, doing so often works against the team and inhibits their ability to be effective. The team becomes just a container for a collection of individual contributors, basically working alone and rarely interacting. The very essence of EA is that everything, in some way or another, depends on everything else. The more you separate coverage areas, the more difficult it is to stitch it all together.

Basically, I am saying to not sweat the organizational issues any more than you must to get a few strong players onto your core team. Don’t be too concerned about segmenting responsibilities discretely among domains. Let individual assignments adapt to the content needs of the enterprise and allow your core group to float among them, learning, growing, and sharing perspectives. Encourage everyone to work together as a team and dynamically rotate individual leadership and deliverable assignments. The team will be better off and the members will be as well, plus less time will be spent deciding who does (and doesn’t) do what and more time will be spent on results.

Location, Location, Location – Where Should an EA Team Report?

At the recent Troux Worldwide Conference in Austin I moderated two panels, one on Top Performing EA Teams and the other on EA Leadership. We had many questions submitted by audience members and were unable to answer them all. In the next few weeks Tim and I will be offering our perspectives on some of the questions the panels didn’t have time for and share thoughts on a few they did. “Where should an EA team report?” was one of the latter.

It seems that many EA teams we talk to ask about reporting structure, either as reinforcement that they are in the right place now, or as justification for reorganization if they are not. If I had to answer, without knowledge of an organization’s specific circumstances, I would say something like “given the latest trends in enterprise architecture towards stronger business architecture, the EA Team should ideally report directly to the CEO or executive committee in some form of a strategy function”. This gives the team the imprimatur of executive authority, strong visibility, and broad reach across business and IT concerns – truly the “enterprise” perspective.

But that answer isn’t realistic in most current organizations. First, we’d have to establish that the team is really doing true “Enterprise” architecture vs. IT architecture. A good discussion on what we mean by this is included in Tim’s blog entry from last year on The Transformational View of EA. Transformational EA specifies business architecture that is owned, driven, developed and maintained by business people as opposed to their IT proxies. It is coordinated in partnership with IT architecture-oriented EA’s focusing on the IT and systems-oriented perspectives. Until that happens it is unlikely that an EA Team will reside at the level of my answer above. If it has happened already, they have probably been moved up to that level or are already well on their way.

The question most EA teams should ask would be “What is the best place for EA to report in MY organization and how do I get there?” The first part of that is a much more straight-forward question to answer. For a Team working on IT architecture the best place to report is directly to the CIO as part of an Office of the CIO, along with the PMO, IT Strategy Group (if not already the EA group), and other CIO functions. This positions the EA team organizationally on par with operations/infrastructure, security/compliance, and development/support.

Many EA teams find themselves deeper in an infrastructure group doing technical architecture or as part of development support organization. Is that bad? Not necessarily. It is the starting place for many EA Teams. It’s only bad if the scope and scale of the team’s reach is constrained by it. I have seen cases where the EA team administratively reports into a supportive infrastructure director (or development director) who recognizes the value of EA, their role, and gives them license to practice something closer to holistic, forward-looking, business-driven EA. After all, good EA teams are not self-contained. They are highly dependent on engaging a virtual community of stakeholders and contributors from across the organization. Where the team reports, provided again that the leader is supportive, is less important than what it does and how it reaches out to influence others.

So, the bottom line answer to the question of where an EA team should report cannot be from a purist perspective but instead should be based on a combination of practical realities along with the vision and aspiration of the team to drive value. Whenever I hear the “where SHOULD we report” question I prefer, instead, to deflect it and work with the team to answer the question “how can they drive maximum value”. If they can’t do it where they are then we determine, realistically, “where COULD they report”, and “what will it take to get there?”

Top-Performing EA Teams – A Panel Discussion

I had the opportunity last week to moderate two panels at the Troux Worldwide Conference. The first panel included EAdirections’ Tim Westbrock along with Mike Walker from Microsoft, Aleks Buterman from SenseAgility and Paul Preiss from IASA. The theme of the panel was a general discussion on characteristics of top-performing EA Teams. To begin the conversation, I asked each panelist to describe what a top-performing EA team meant to them. What I had originally believed to be a softball question that would show the breadth of issues and perspectives on EA turned out to be more controversial than I had expected.

The panel became caught up in the role of EA and the role of IT architects. Unfortunately, the conversations became focused on the differences in the roles instead of how they work together, diving too far into a differentiation of the “primary” roles and skills of each. It revealed some of the confusion around EA and shone a light on many of the issues that practicing enterprise architects must deal with on a daily basis. What I had hoped would be a conversation addressing how the EA function must be multi-purposed, strategic and tactical, business and IT-oriented, and with an eye to both short and long-term value delivery became overly focused on narrower perspectives. We had a few rough spots as we worked our way through the session, but luckily we ended well. We landed at the recognition that while the roles are different they share some common skills and, after all, they should be collectively working to achieve positive results for their organizations. Individuals in both of these roles will inevitably be working closely with each other.

Personally, I believe that the biggest part of being a top-performing EA team is learning to strike the right balance across the perspectives listed above. It isn’t about doing just one thing or having a “primary” concern as much as it is about how well the EA leaders cover the bases, shifting emphasis from strategic, business-oriented concerns, to helping certain initiatives head down the right path, and then back again as dictated by the situation. It is about breadth, and reach, and longevity.

In future posts Tim or I will examine several of the questions asked by the audience, some answered by the panel and others that we didn’t have time to address.

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.

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.

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.

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.