One of the biggest challenges with business transformation and technology enabled change, is the ability of both people in the business and in IT to sit down and have a conversation with each other and for that conversation to be fully understood by all concerned. Ok, there are many other challenges such as benefits realisation, programme management, culture change, but aren’t they all people based and therefore conversation based?

Now i am simplifying this somewhat but it is a challenge that people in IT and that includes me now (my previous role of corporate web manager was based within corporate communications)

To give an indication as to the issue i thought i’d use a video from you tube. It is 40 seconds long and is about the German Coastguard.

What i find interesting about this video is that for me it kind of sums up the challenge faced by IT. In the video the guy has all the technology he needs in front of him to do his job and support a wider network of other professionals, who all have the same goal (save people). However with all that technology what lets the person down is the ability to understand the “customer”.

The ability to have “conversations” is becoming the new skill that people require in order to support change. Now i also want to make the point that people in the Business also need to learn how to have better and more productive conversations with people in IT.

Now having worked in the Business for some time, i can already hear people saying “Why should i learn how to interact with IT?” Well the answer is simple, as the pressure of budget reductions increases, technology will become even more critical for progressive business transformation across organisations. It is therefore a priority for Business people to get a real understanding of the applications that support their business and the opportunities they present. If Business people can’t do that then we end up losing the opportunities as they get “lost in translation” between IT people (who don’t understand business) and Business people (who don’t understand IT).

This is however a journey we all have to make together, as a partnership, a fellowship, a collaborative effort, whatever the terminology we decide to choose. Like most journey’s the value is not the destination but what you learn along the way.

I’ve briefly covered how an EA team might *react* when faced with a particular dominant strategy formation style in an organisation in some previous posts .

This isn’t good enough for me though: I want it all and I want it to be the way I want it!

So if a particular strategy formation paradigm isn’t to your taste as an EA, what can you do about it? Is there a “preferred style” that EAs should always aspire to on behalf of their organisations? Is this even ethical?

Complex questions, and no clear answers. It may be that an EA team will see trends coming that they feel will negatively impact their organisation if the strategic paradigm isn’t changed. That’s good. But if the EA team aren’t the ones taking the risks in the organisation (for example, putting up the money!), perhaps they don’t have any business making senior management change their approach by fair means or foul.

I think that EAs will always have well thought-out views on the way organisations make strategic decisions – it goes with the job. Each EA will have to decide if and how they agitate for change dependent on their own values and with a mind to their own positions (especially in political organisations). So with that massive caveat, let’s look at the tools EAs have for making changes to strategy formation, based around the services that EA teams provide.

- Architecture Creation: an EA team can create architectural models that emphasise the sovereignty of a particular group or population in the organisation. Such a model could, over a long period of time, transfer decision-making power to different groups and thereby influence the strategy style. This probably comes under the category of “EA black ops” though and is vulnerable to existing powerful stakeholders pulling the plug on the EA team

- EA consulting: can promote particular styles of project delivery, and in the process embed particular ways of thinking in to the organisation

- EA compliance: can block or alter the course of projects that don’t echo the EA team’s preferred style.

- EA communication: this is the biggest way that EAs influence the organisation as a whole. It may be difficult to get into conversations with key stakeholders, however, if the organisation is very hierarchical and EAs will need to use their contacts to leverage themselves into conversations

- EA research: this is where EAs can do the ethical thing by bringing the trends that effect strategy creation styles to the attention of the people who can change them (not always senior management).

Change is always difficult: persuading powerful people that they need to personally change is even more hazardous. Building a momentum and sense of urgency behind the change is therefore always going to be important.

What wins: the unstoppable force, or the immovable object?

Recently we’ve been engaged in a process, like many local authorities, of connecting ourselves up to the Government Secure extranet. In order to do this (and access a range of applications hosted by central government and other agencies) then public sector bodies have to clear a number of hurdles in the form of the Code of Connection (CoCo) – a list of security standards that we have to meet in order to provide assurance that the sensitive data that will be carried will be secure.

So far, so sensible. But there’s a problem: the rules (devised by the Government’s security wing, CESG) state that a local authority must own the equipment that is being used to access the service. That is the immovable object in the opening statement of this posting. So what is the unstoppable force?

The consumerisation of ICT has been on our minds for a long time, and even more so with the advent of cheap (or free) cloud computing services like Google Apps. If the ICT department can’t come up with solutions that satisfy the requirements of ease, speed and convenience demanded by today’s digital natives, they will simply move their data somewhere that does. To this end IT strategy has largely been about providing fast access on any device, from any location, to data.

So we have a problem: how can we enable these consumer devices to access our data whilst protecting the security of our connection to the rest of government?

Possible answers include segmenting our network to provide services to unmanaged devices on one side and fully managed services (including public sector network) on the other. But this is expensive. Alternatively, some argue that a bootable device (like the BeCrypt trusted Client) could be used to provide a trusted platform on any machine to access secure GC services. We don’t yet know if these solutions pass muster with CESG though: so stay tuned.

We’re really interested to know if other local authorities have dealt with this problem and if so, how they’ve gone about mitigating the downsides.

In my last post I put forward the idea that the way an EA operation goes about its business might differ according to the sort of decision-making structures that are routinely used in an organisation.

I need to apologise for the length of that post and the occasional shorthand that crept in whilst I attempted to condense a large amount of information into something blog-sized: I totally fail at plain English!

In an attempt to rectify that somewhat, in this (also quite long) post I’d like to show how this theory might actually deliver some value. To do this I will leverage a post by Gartner’s Bruce Robertson where he describes an EA effort as a set of services that it provides to a business. To summarise Bruce’s post somewhat, these services are:

• EA creation (development of organisational and architectural models to help unify strategic and IT planning)
• EA consulting (where an EA adds value to a project by helping it align itself with strategy and future trends)
• EA compliance (where a project is assessed for its fit with the organisation’s future direction, strategy, infrastructure and referred or accepted)
• EA communication (where EAs insert themselves into the conversations that happen around the organisation, educate, inform, listen and adapt)
• EA research (looking at new trends, new technology, industry analysis etc)

To illustrate how the concept of an EA style might be applied in the real world, let’s consider 2 extreme examples: a small owner-managed retail outlet and a medium-sized public sector organisation (oooh, like a council maybe).

Firstly lets look at how strategy is formed in these two organisations. In the small business, the owner will make all the decisions. She is an entrepreneur with a vision that caused her to start the business: she knows what she wants (but might change her mind if she gets new information): objectives will be in terms of sales and business growth. In the council, on the other hand, strategic direction is broadly set by politicians who are elected every 4 years: there is a hierarchical structure: central government makes statutory demands: audit and transparency are required.

The former, then, is an entrepreneurial business and demands an entrepreneurial style. The EA (probably in this case either the owner herself or an external consultant) needs to plug in to the vision and realise it quickly: management information from POS systems, staffing levels and training, marketing research processes are all needed.

• EA models will be simple and amount to a description of the various processes required
• EA consulting will be about challenging the owner’s vision, acting as a “critical friend”
• EA compliance will be about ensuring that new initiatives (like diversifying product range or opening another outlet) are consistent with the vision
• EA communication will be about networking with other entrepreneurs to see if synergies can be created, marketing the business informally and educating the entrepreneur about the risks she might be getting exposed to
• EA research will involve looking at trends in the sector to see if anything is coming up that might change or disrupt the business model or create new opportunities.

All these processes will happen informally, sometimes all at once.  There will be few reports written, diagrams drawn, or software tools used.

The public sector organisation, by contrast, is fundamentally political. Direction is set by elected politicians and this creates a cultural background that the organisation has to work with. Political fashions change: one ruling party might be focussed on making investments for particular social or economic outcomes, while another might be more focussed on shrinking the organisation scope and cutting costs.

In this kind of organisation, a team will not survive if it doesn’t manage its stakeholders. A brilliant team that doesn’t do what the most powerful people want is doomed – regardless of how brilliant it is or how hard it works. So the EA team need to gain traction by identifying the most powerful stakeholders and finding out (sometimes indirectly) what their priorities are and finding ways to deliver them:

• EA models will be just detailed enough to describe the area of stakeholder concern
• EA consulting will challenge projects to deliver the top priorities
• EA compliance will focus on rooting out those projects that work against the main stakeholder priorities
• EA communication will be the biggest part of the job, trying to understand the currents of influence that run through the organisation so that the team can flow with them
• EA research will look at new ways these priorities can be delivered

Although these are very different types of organisations, with different approaches, in both cases the EA team acts as a facilitator for the usual strategy formation process.

Sometimes, though, we might want to change that. But that’s another topic.

Back in August a number of posts appeared in the blogosphere following Gartner’s press release encouraging the use of “emergent architecture”. The debate is nicely summarised here (http://www.biske.com/blog/?p=670) by Todd Biske.

The language that Gartner used, however, rang some bells with me: in my recent studies I looked at the various schools of corporate strategy making as defined by Henry Mintzberg (nicely summarised at http://www.12manage.com/methods_mintzberg_ten_schools_of_thought.html ): Mintzberg obviously had his own favourites, but nevertheless had tried to describe the various ways that strategy *could* (not necessarily should!) be formed in an organisation.

Organisations obviously come in all shapes and sizes. Some have strategy formation processes that go back a long way or are dictated by their constitutions or remits: an army will always require a certain amount of disciplined, top-down formal strategy creation compared to a web 2.0 startup with 3 people, which needs to react quickly to change strategy if something new and game-changing appears on the market. Government agencies will always be answerable to politicians and will need to change strategy every electoral period to suit the new administration. Publicly listed companies need to drive shareholder value and adopt a strategy creation process that will suit their goals, depending on which sector they are in.

So what does this mean for an enteprise architect? Perhaps the EA effort needs to initially align and then seek to transform strategy creation processes in its organisation?

Mintzberg defined 10 “schools” of strategy formation in total. I’ve listed them below and spent a grand total of 10 minutes considering what form the EA effort might take in each case.

Design

• Deliberate strategy creation as a process of conception. Match the internal situation of the organisation with external factors.
• Use tools like SWOT analysis, Ashridge Model
• Planned
• EA must: use a “Classic” Gartner approach, based around CRV and creating strategic solutions: TOGAF

Planning

• Deliberate strategy creation as a formal process. Separate planning teams create strategy and use a pre-defined execution methodology.
• Scenario Planning: Parenting Styles
• Planned
• EA must: use Zachman approach coupled with strong project management methodology (eg Prince2, MSP): TOGAF

Positioning

• Deliberate strategy creation as an analytical process. Positioning of organisation within industry or market.
• 5 forces: value chains: BCG matrix: game theory
• Planned
• EA must: use Heuristic approach utilising reference models, eg MIT EAS approach: TOGAF

Entrepreneurial

• Semi-deliberate strategy formation as a visionary process. CEO is architect of the strategy.
• Emphasises intuition, judgement, vision, leadership styles
• Semi-planned
• EA must: Inform and deliver the CEO vision: challenge, support, and then formally design and programme manage: TOGAF and heuristic tools

Cognitive

• Strategy creation as a mental process. Maps, schemas, concepts and viewpoints.
• Groupthink: MBTI: Johari Window: Cognitive bias
• Emergent
• EA must: Support cognitive processes across the organisation and making them real

Learning

• Strategy creation as an emergent process. What works and what doesn’t gets incorporated over time in a series of small steps.
• Organisational Learning: Knowedge Management: SECI model
• Emergent
• EA must: Provide a set of standards that the strategy can use as a platform for its learning. IFAPS.

Power

• Strategy creation as a process of negotiation.
• Stakeholder analysis: force-field analysis: stakeholder mapping
• Emergent
• EA must: Identify powerful stakeholders and realise their common visions.

Cultural

• Strategy creation as a collective process, as a reflection of the organisational culture.
• Cultural Intelligence: Ashridge Mission model
• Emergent
• EA must: Define dominant values, design and build social networks, and critically appraise the corporate culture

Environmental

• Strategy creation as a reactive process. Sees the environment as the dominant factor in determining strategic direction.
• Contingency theory: situational leadership
• Emergent
• EA must: Design and build solutions to give the organisation more options in the expected future environment

Configuration

• Strategy creation as a transformational process.  Organisations change structure as strategy changes.  Manage stability and discontinuous change without too much disruption.
• Organisational configurations: chaos theory: catastrophe theory: disruptive innovation
• Planned / Emergent
• EA must: Propose and design valid alternative configurations (for discontinuous change) and systems of  continuous improvement (for stable phases)

Interested to maybe develop this further: what sort of strategy creation style is prevalent in your organisation?

Some councils have chosen to implement ERP systems such as SAP or Oracle e-Business suite to consolidate a number of their core systems.  It is argued that, by installing a “vanilla” out of the box ERP system and by forcing changes to business processes to align with the ERP system, big savings can be made in the business processes themselves as they become more streamlined: and that consolidating systems such as finance, HR, payroll, procurement, project management, CRM and supply chain management can yield efficiencies through more integrated working and improve management information.

As an EA, however, I think I have to look at this the other way around: assuming the business wants process standardisation, better integration, and better management information, what’s the architecture that will deliver that?

I don’t know for sure, but wouldn’t integration be better delivered by an SOA implementation? Shouldn’t we implement BPM to improve and standardise our processes? Don’t we want data warehousing and BI tools to give management information?

And culturally, if we are going to implement an IT system to force through structural and process changes that we want to see, isn’t that the kind of thinking that got us into a mess in the first place?

I don’t know for sure and it is almost certain that the best practices inherent in some out of the box ERP systems will improve and streamline operations and save money. But when a business makes an investment decision on an ERP type of scale, what’s the opportunity cost?

Interested to know what others think about this, especially those working in a council that has implemented such a system.

What are we?

We are Enterprise Architects, thinkers, dreamers, intelligence gatherers, visionaries, police, communicators, persuaders, presenters, sharers, writers, budget planners, strategists, principled … Is there any wonder we find it hard to explain who we are and what we do!

Earlier this year we embarked on a pilot project on Internal Social Networking using  a product called Bluekiwi.

I was at the Localgovcamp event on Saturday and ran a session on our experiences and lessons learned. It proved very useful to me as well as others so i thought i would capture that in a blog post.

It is important to note here that whilst i am personally keen on social networking as a way of supporting business transformation, the technology is only one part of enabling the wider business change required to realise the benefits of moving in this direction.

Like most organisations we experience a silo mentality, this isn’t always a negative thing, organisational structures are a form of social network, so they do often make sense, but when you work in large organisations, the ability to share and exchange internal best practice and ideas becomes harder if you don’t have any processes for allowing knowledge etc to be shared.

We also recognised that internal helpdesks are often overloaded with simple requests and common questions. The answers to most of these could be captured in a tool which either allowed the helpdesk to contribute or in our view allow users to submit answers themselves – essentially providing a user support community, much like you see online for products.

We did struggle to really know how the organisation would respond to this pilot and were reluctant to promise anything we didn’t feel a pilot could actually deliver. This did mean that the business case was pretty thin on the ground, the main areas we focused on were around possible reduction in helpdesk calls, ideas forum (only one idea had to really deliver the cost of the pilot to demonstrate value) but we also made a big play on the “potential” opportunities that could be presented when people get together and start interacting and having conversations.

We did know that once people started to engage they would start to see the opportunities for themselves (after all they know their business better than we do) and that is what started to happen.  We knew that by “connecting people” in new ways would spark ideas and conversations, we also knew that it would provide new opportunities for surfacing common issues and problems and our hope was that it would become self supporting (after all we all like to chat with our colleague about “stuff”).

We did target some groups, due to the pilot nature, we wanted to focus on enabling groups who could potentially demonstrate value in different ways. So we had a mix of cross directorate groups from different levels of the organisation (no one directly from the front line at this stage) who after conversations with these groups had identified some other groups who they thought they could benefit from being connected to.

We initiated a Pilot Project to help us learn more about how this functionality could offer value  -  my view was that if we could learn to professionally experience Social Networking inside the council and start to engage with staff in new and exciting ways, it wouldn’t be too much of a step to engage with the public in similar spaces.

However the reality of the pilot was that the business case was pretty thin, and was more about learning lessons and a “leap of faith” then about real metrics and business value.

We are only 3 months into the pilot and we are learning about new opportunities all the time, i will continue to post my thoughts about the benefits and pitfalls.

In the meantime, I thought I would share this video interview that David Wilcox recorded of Rob Gray (Blue Ocean IQ) and Myself at Localgovcamp.

That’s the message we are getting about EA in general – we need to communicate better! To that end, we have spent two days together this week looking at all things “communication”.

It’s been a good two days, we have worked on who we are, what we are, stakeholders and key messages – we even have a new tag line – as shown above. I hope you like it!

Trying to put all we have talked about into practice is going to be a challenge for all of us, but we like a challenge!

This is a excellent post and describes in my opinion the very reason why Enterprise Architecture is essentially increasing across organisations.

To enable the business to make more decisions and to take the control away from IT themselves to enable a more responsive and flexible IT organisation.

I really like the concept of the “IT Gate” programme. I can see real value in that within a local government situation.

companies need to charter an IT “gifted-and-talented” program (“Gate”) that gives lead users special IT privileges — the best tools, equipment, education, and support — as long as they agree to “first do no harm,” clean up their own messes, and support the less-talented around them.

via Find the IT Innovator Within – Susan Cramm – Harvard Business Review.