Showing posts with label IT governance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IT governance. Show all posts

May 3, 2019

What Are The Chances for IT Project Success?

So I was teaching a class in Enterprise Architecture and IT Governance this week. 

In one of the class exercises, one of the students presented something like this bell-shaped distribution curve in explaining a business case for an IT Project. 

The student took a nice business approach and utilized a bell-shaped curve distribution to explain to his executives the pros and cons of a project. 

Basically, depending on the projects success, the middle (1-2 standard deviations, between 68-95% chance), the project will yield a moderate level of efficiencies and cost-savings or not. 

Beyond that:

- To the left are the downside risks for significant losses--project failure, creating dysfunction, increased costs, and operational risks to the mission/business. 

- To the right is the upside potential for big gains--innovations, major process reengineering, automation gains, and competitive advantages. 

This curve is probably a fairly accurate representation based on the high IT project failure rate in most organizations (whether they want to admit it or not). 

I believe that with:
- More user-centric enterprise architecture planning on the front-end
- Better IT governance throughout
- Agile development and scrum management in execution 
that we can achieve ever higher project success rates along the big upside potential that comes with it!  

We still have a way to go to improve, but the bell-curve helps explains what organizations are most of the time getting from their investments. ;-)

(Source Graphic: Adapted by Andy Blumenthal from here)
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March 28, 2018

Technology and Human Capital--They Go Hand-In-Hand

So there are some mighty impressive places to work that really shine in terms of the technology they use and the constant desire to upgrade and improve their capabilities. 

Usually, these are also the places that value and respect their human capital because they view them as not just human pawns, but rather as strategic drivers of change. 

Then there are the places that are "so operationally focused" or just plain poorly run that they can't be bothered to think about technology much at all or the people that make up the organization and its fiber. 

In many cases, the wheel may be turning, but the hamster is dead: 

There is no real enterprise architecture to speak of. 

There are no IT strategic or operational plans. 

There are no enterprise or common solutions or platforms. 

There is no IT governance or project/portfolio management. 

Even where there are some IT projects, they go nowhere--they are notions or discussion pieces, but nothing ever rolls off the IT "assembly line."

How about buying an $800 software package to improve specific operations--that gets the thumbs down too. 

Many of these executives can't even spell t-e-c-h-n-o-l-o-g-y!

It's scary when technology is such an incredible enabler that some can't see it for what it is. 

Rather to them, technology is a distraction, a threat, a burdensome cost, or something we don't have time for.

Are they scared of technology?

Do they just not understand its criticality or capability?

Are they just plain stupid? 

Anyway, organizations need to look at their leadership and ask what are they doing not only operationally, but also in terms of technology improvement to advance the organization and its mission. 

Look to the organizations that lead technologically, as well as that treat their people well, and those are ones to ogle at and model after.  ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
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August 28, 2011

Can't Live With Them, Can't Live Without Them

I remember years ago, my father used to joke about my mother (who occasionally got on his nerves :-): "you can't live with them, and you can't live without them."

Following the frequently dismal state of IT project performance generally, I'm beginning to think that way about technology projects.

On one hand, technology represents innovation, automation, and the latest advances in engineering and science--and we cannot live without it--it is our future!

On the other hand, the continuing poor track record of IT project delivery is such that we cannot live with it--they are often highly risky and costly:
  • In 2009, the Standish Group reported that 68% of IT projects were failing or seriously challenged--over schedule, behind budget, and not meeting customer requirements.

  • Most recently, according to Harvard Business Review (September 2011), IT projects are again highlighted as "riskier than you think." Despite efforts to rein in IT projects, "New research shows surprisingly high numbers of out-of-control tech projects--ones that can sink entire companies and careers."

  • Numerous high profile companies with such deeply problematic IT projects are mentioned, including: Levi Strauss, Hershey's, Kmart, Airbus, and more.

  • The study found that "Fully one in six of the projects we studied [1,471 were examined] was a black swan, with a cost overrun of 200% on average, and a schedule overrun of almost 70%."

  • In other words there is a "fat tail" to IT project failure. "It's not that they're particularly prone to high cost overruns on average...[rather] an unusually large proportion of them incur massive overages--that is, there are a disproportionate number of black swans."

  • Unfortunately, as the authors state: "these numbers seems comfortably improbable, but...they apply with uncomfortable frequency."
In recent years, the discipline of project management and the technique of earned value management have been in vogue to better manage and control runaway IT projects.
At the federal government level, implementation of such tools as the Federal IT Dashboard for transparency and TechStats for ensuring accountability have course-corrected or terminated more than $3 billion in underperforming IT projects.
Technology projects, as R&D endeavors, come with inherent risk. Yet even if the technical aspect is successful, the human factors are likely to get in the way. In fact, they may be the ultimate IT "project killers"--organizational politics, technology adoption, change management, knowledge management, etc.
Going forward, I see the solution as two-pronged:
  • On the one hand we must focus on enhancing pure project management, performance measurement, architecture and governance, and so on.

  • At the same time, we also need to add more emphasis on people (our human capital)--ensuring that everyone is fully trained, motivated, empowered and has ownership. This is challenging considering that our people are very much at a breaking point with all the work-related stress they are facing.
These days organizations face numerous challenges that can be daunting. These range from the rapid pace of change, the cutthroat global competition at our doorsteps, a failing education system, spiraling high unemployment, and mounting deficits. All can be helped through technology, but for this to happen we must have the project management infrastructure and the human factors in place to make it work.

If our technology is to bring us the next great breakthrough, we must help our people to deliver it collaboratively.

The pressure is on--we can't live with it and we cannot live without it. IT project failures are a people problem as much as a technology problem. However, once we confront it as such, I believe that we can expect the metrics on failed IT projects to change significantly to success.

(Source Photo: here)


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April 7, 2011

TechStat For Managing IT Investments


TechStat is a governance model to "turn around or terminate" underperforming projects in the IT portfolio.

This is one of the key tenets in the 25-Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal IT.

The training video (above) is an introduction to the TechStat model.

The goal is improved IT investment management and accountability for IT programs.

More information on TechStat, and in particular the toolkit for implementation, is available at the Federal CIO website.

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September 11, 2010

Toward A Federal Enterprise Architecture Board


A Federal Enterprise Architecture Board (FEAB) would provide “teeth” to further implementing enterprise architecture across government.

We have a Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) that provides a government wide framework for architecture strategy and planning, but we do not have a FEA Board to govern the subsequent IT investments through capital planning and investment control (CPIC). CPIC is the governance process whereby we select, control, and evaluate new IT investments.

Interestingly, The Federal CIO Council’s Architecture Alignment and Assessment Guide (October 2000) specifically calls for complementary EA and CPIC functions (see graphics).

In this paradigm, the enterprise architecture (EA) informs, guides, drives the CPIC, and in turn the decisions from the CPIC governance process updates the EA planning, so that the EA and CPIC processes are seen as mutually supportive.

In the federal government, we have departmental and agency architectures and boards that serve to plan and govern IT investments at their respective levels. However, as we seek to build greater standardization, interoperability, and reuse across government with IT initiatives that cut across traditional government boundaries driven and guided by the Federal CIO and Federal CIO Council, there is a need for a FEAB to review new and major changes to IT investments.

There would be many purposes for the FEAB.

  • Strategic alignment: One would be to ensure strategic alignment not to any single department or agency mission, but rather to the greater federal government strategy and policy. Some examples of this would be data center consolidation, green IT, open government, and more.
  • Streamlining of investments: Additionally, the FEAB would assess IT investments to ensure that there is no overlap or opportunities for consolidation of initiatives. OMB performs some of this function today, but a FEAB would augment their capability with IT subject matter experts from across the government.
  • Other key benefits: Of course, the FEAB would also look at things like return on investment measures, risk mitigation plans, technical compliance to federal architecture standards and mandates (security, privacy, records, FOIA, Section 508, etc.).

The FEAB would not be a substitute for the EA Boards that provide oversight functions at the department and agency levels, but would provide governance for the largest and riskiest IT initiatives and those that cut across different agencies.

While the OMB currently assesses IT investments using Exhibits 300s and 53s, which include EA assessment questions, the FEAB would provide a governance board made up of cross-cutting governmental IT subject matter experts to vet these business cases from an EA perspective thoroughly and provide recommendations to the Federal CIO Council and the OMB on approval or denial. Therefore, and not unimportantly, the stand-up of a FEAB would add an important human factor to the Federal Enterprise Architecture and make it “real.”

Of course, with a portfolio of some 10,000 IT systems, the FEAB would not be able to govern every new Federal IT investment. Therefore, it would be critical to establish thresholds that would be practical for implementation.

I would envision the FEAB being chaired by the Federal Architect and the board being a recommendation body to the Federal CIO Council and the Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President.

Critical initiatives by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra to effectively manage (i.e. CPIC control phase) IT investments through the Federal IT Dashboard and TechStat sessions would be augmented by the FEAB work to carefully recommend for selection (i.e. CPIC select phase) new federal IT investments.

Together, I see the federal select and control mechanisms of CPIC functioning in harmony to enhance governments IT planning, investment decision-making, and execution. Essentially, the FEA (architecture) and FEAB (governance) on the “front-end” will guide new IT investments, and the IT Dashboard and TechStat sessions on the “back-end” will ensure IT investments are properly progressing for the taxpayer based on cost, schedule, and performance measures.

In summary, the Federal Enterprise Architecture Board would be the governance arm of the Federal Enterprise Architecture, and serve as a support to the IT leadership of the Federal CIO, the Federal CIO Council, and the IT budgetary functions performed by the Office of Management and Budget.

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July 31, 2010

Listening to Each Other to Succeed as a Team

There is an oft-cited best practice for conflict resolution called the speaker-listener technique—in which the speaker explains their position and the listener repeats back to the speaker what he heard him say. Then the speaker and listener switch roles.

After both sides have had a chance to express themselves, and the other side has repeated what they heard, both parties are ready to resolve their differences with greater understanding of each other.

The Wall Street Journal, 27 July 2010, in an article called “Fighting Happily Ever After” promotes the speaker-listener technique for improving couples communications and making happier, longer-lasting relationships.

I believe that the speaker-listener technique works not only because it improves the actual information flow and understanding between people, but also because it improves the perception that people have towards each other—from being adversarial to being collaborative.

In the sheer act of reaching out to others through genuine listening and understanding, we establish the trust of the other person that we want to work toward a win-win solution, as opposed to a clobber the other guy with what you want to do, and go home victorious.

In contrast, think of how many times people don’t really talk with each other, but rather at each other. When this occurs, there is very little true interaction of the parties—instead it is a dump by one on the other. This is particularly of concern to an organization when the speaker is in a position of authority and the listener has legitimate concerns that don’t get heard or taken seriously.

For example, when the boss (as speaker) “orders” his/her employees to action instead of engaging and discussing with them, the employees (as listener) may never really understand why they are being asked to perform as told (what the plan is) or even permitted to discuss how best they can proceed (what the governance is).

Here, there is no real two-way engagement. Rather, workers are related to by their superiors as automatons or chess pieces rather than as true value-add people to the mission/organization.

In the end, it is not very fulfilling for either party—more than that when it comes to architecture, governance, and execution, we frequently end up with lousy plans, decisions, and poorly performing investments.

Instead, think about the potential when employers and employees work together as a team to solve problems. With leaders facilitating strategic discussions and engaging with their staffs in open dialogue to innovate and seeking everyone’s input, ideas, reactions. Here employees not only know the plan and understand it, but are part of its development. Further, people are not just told what to do, but they can suggest “from the front lines” what needs to be done and work with others from a governance model on where this fits in the larger organizational context.

Speaking—listening—and understating each other is the essence of good conflict management and of treating people with decency and respect. Moreover, it is not just for couple relationship building, but also for developing strong organizational bonds and successfully planning and execution.

To me, creating a framework for conflict resolution and improved communication is an important part of what good enterprise architecture and IT governance is all about in the organization. Yet we don’t often talk about these human factors in technology settings. Rather the focus is on the end state, the tool, the more impersonal technical aspects of IT implementation and compliance.

Good architecture and governance processes help to remedy this a bit:

With architecture—we work together to articulate a strategic roadmap for the organization; this provides the goals, objectives, initiatives, and milestones that we work towards in concert.

With governance—we listen to each other and understand new requirements, their strategic alignment, return on investment, and the portfolio management of them. We listen, we discuss, we understand, and we make IT investment decisions accordingly.

Nevertheless, at this time the focus in IT is still heavily weighted toward operations. Research on IT employee morale shows that we need to better incorporate and mature our human capital management practices. We need to improve how we speak with, listen to and build understanding of others not only because that is the right thing to do, but because that will enable us to achieve better end results.


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July 28, 2010

Newer Isn’t Always Better

I love new technology as much or more than the next guy, but...

Last month, I came across an article in USA Today called “Army Ditches Velcro For Buttons,” which chronicles how after deploying high-tech, “space-age Velcro” in uniforms in 2004, the Army found that the good old button worked better on keeping pants packets closed. The Army is now substituting three buttons for Velcro on the cargo pockets of its pants to keep them from opening up and spilling out.

To me, the point is not whether we use new, newer, or even the newest technology out there (like space-age Velcro), but whether we are right-fitting the technology to our organization (in this case, the button met the needs of the soldier better).

I’m sure you may have noticed, as have I that certain technology enthusiasts like, want and literally crave the “latest and greatest” technology gizmos and gadgets, whether they fully work yet or not.

These enthusiasts are often the first to download a new (still buggy) app and the ones that line up (often bringing their own lounge chairs) the night before a new iPhone or other “hot” consumer technology product goes to market.

Similar, and perhaps well-intentioned, enthusiasm for new technology can end up in pushing new technologies before the organization is ready for them (in terms of maturity, adoption, change, priorities, etc.). In other cases, newer technologies may be launched even before the “ink is dried” on IT purchases already made (i.e. the technologies bought are not yet implemented and there has been no return on investment achieved!).

At the extreme, organizations may find themselves with proverbial IT storage closets full of still shrink-wrapped boxes of software and crates of unopened IT hardware and still not be deterred from making another purchase and another and another…

I remember in graduate school learning about shopaholics and those so addicted to consumerism that their behavior bordered on the abnormal according to the Bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM).

This behavior is in sharp contrast with organizations that are disciplined with technology and strong stewards with their organization’s investment dollars—they tend to follow a well-thought-out plan and a structured governance process to ensure that money is well-spent on IT—i.e. it is requirements-driven, strategically aligned, ROI-based, and technologically compliant with the architecture.

In such organizations, responsibility and accountability for IT investments go hand-in-hand, so that success is not measured by whether new technologies get identified and investments “go through,” but rather by how beneficial a technology is for the end-user in doing their jobs and how quickly it actually gets successfully implemented.

This latter organization model is the more mature one and the one that we need to emulate in terms of their architecture and governance. Like the Army, these organizations will chose the old fashioned button over the newer Velcro when it suits the soldier better and will even come out saving 96 cents per uniform.

New technology is great--the key is to be flexible and strategic about when it is needed and when it is not.


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April 16, 2010

Breaking Down Organizational Bottlenecks

Improving organizational performance is often grounded in identifying bottlenecks (constraints) and fixing them, so that the firm runs better, faster, cheaper than before and at an advantage to it’s competitors.

Enterprise architecture helps us to locate the bottlenecks through an understanding of our business processes, information flows, and systems and then facilitates our reengineering these though business process improvement and the introduction of new technologies.

Harvard Business School (HBS) put out a working paper in February 2010 called “The Strategic Use of Architectural Knowledge by Entrepreneurial firms,” by Carliss Baldwin that describes how “an entrepreneurial firm can use architectural knowledge to unseat a larger incumbent.”

The premise is that knowledge is a firm’s most critical resource, “including knowledge about how to assemble resources to pursue an opportunity.”

We can architecturally disassemble and assemble our resources and processes whereby we—“isolate the bottlenecks” and then “alleviate the bottlenecks.”

This process is grounded in modularity theory, where we use architectural knowledge to modularize (or breakdown) a complex system into its functional components as well as address how these components are related (through their interfaces).

Once we decompose the firms business, data, and systems into its modular components, we can then “remodularize” (or assemble) them into strategically more effective systems for doing business.

Moreover, the paper suggests that the firm “insources bottleneck components and outsources non-bottleneck components,” so as to focus resources (and innovation) on the trouble spots—the areas that are potentially a source of competitive advantage.

Fixing bottlenecks can produce valuable differentiators for a company that we would not want shared with those outside the organization and made available to competitors.

In my opinion, bottleneck functions can also be outsourced, whereby we decide to “let the experts handle it,” when the functions are not strategic in nature. For example, many companies outsource things like payroll and basic call center functions, and it enable the organization to focus its energy and efforts on its core mission.

The notion that enterprise architecture itself is a strategic differentiator for organizations that know how to wield the architecture knowledge is critically important. Through decomposition and assembly of processes and enabling technologies, we can create stronger organizations that not only reduce bottlenecks, but also drive improved decision-making in terms of what to invest in and how to source those investments.

While many organizations treat architecture as a compliance only mechanism and reap little to no benefits from it, those that understand EA’s strategic significance can use the knowledge gained to their organization’s competitive advantage.


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April 13, 2010

We Can't Ignore or Fear Technology For Long

New Article by Andy Blumenthal in Architecture and Governance Magazine (April 2010)

http://tinyurl.com/y3xgrlb

__________________________________

When it comes to new technology, first comes ignorance, then comes fear, then comes the embrace and rush to the IT department to make it happen—now!

This scenario plays out again and again in organizations—there are three key phases to technology adoption.

Ignorance—people are unaware, misinformed, or just don’t understand the potential that a new technology holds. In some cases, it’s because they generally haven’t been exposed to the technology, in other cases, it is because they are going forward with eyes wide-shut (what they don’t know can’t harm them or so they think).

Fear—OMG. A new technology; I can’t deal with this. “I’m used to doing it X way.” “Why do we have to change.” “I can’t learn this new technology.” There is fear of something new, of change, of the unknown.

Embrace—The acknowledgement that a new technology is important to the organization; that it can’t be ignored; that it isn’t going away; that the competitors are already getting onboard. Oh uh. Get the CIO in here. We need this technology, now! Where are we going to find finding for it this year (or quarter, whatever). We need to reprioritize our IT projects, so this is at the top (or near it). Let’s get everyone right on this. Can we meet early this week?

I read an interesting article in Public CIO magazine (January 2010) called “A Mile Wide And An Inch Deep,” about how social media is becoming pervasive in government.

In the article it states: “Last year, a Public CIO reader survey found that social media didn’t make the list of the top 10 technology priorities for 2009. Today, it’s become the No. 1 topic among public CIOs.”

In between not making the top 10 technology list and becoming No. 1, social media was vilified as being something that would make the organization lose control of its message, that was a security risk, and that was a colossal waste of employees’ time and should be banned (or blocked and it was by 40% of organizations).

As the pace of technology innovation increases, the lifecycle of adoption has also rapidly advanced. For example, with social media, we went from ignorance to fear to the embrace in one year flat!

Chris Curran, chief technology officer for Diamond Management and Technology Consultants Inc., is quoted in the article as stating:

“If you rewind to 1995, the attitude back then was, “No Internet use at work.” Then it became, “No Internet shopping during work hours.” But over time, the issue just went away, because a majority of employees are good people, hardworking and productive. Some people are going to do stupid things whether they have access to social networking or not. But it doesn’t make sense to ignore a social trend that is bigger than your organization.”

You can’t ignore important new technologies or let fear get the better of you. At one time, people were saying oh no we can’t change from paper communications to email. We need everything hardcopy. And that changed. Now email is the norm or should I say was the norm, because social computing for the younger generation is becoming the new email.

The answer for IT leaders to advance organizational adoption of valuable new technologies is to:

· Create awareness and understanding of new technologies—the benefits and the risks (and how they will be mitigated).

· Establish sound planning and IT governance processes for capturing business requirements and aligning new technologies to best meet these.

· Provide new technologies coupled with ample communications and training to ensure that the technologies are not just more shelfware, but that they are readily adopted and fulfill their potential in the organization to advance the mission and productivity.

The phases of technology adoption: Ignorance, fear, and embrace are not abnormal or bad; they are human. And as people, we must have time to recognize and adjust to change. You can’t force technology down people’s throats (proverbially speaking) and you can’t command organizational readiness and poof, there it is. But rather, as IT leaders, we need to be sensitive to where people and organizations are at on the adoption lifecycle and help to identify those emerging technologies with genuine net benefits that can’t be ignored or feared—they must be embraced and the sooner the better for the organization, its people, and all its stakeholders.


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January 23, 2010

Strategic Decision Making Trumps The Alternative

A strategist frequently has to temper the desire for structured planning and strategic decision making with the reality of organizational life, which includes:

· Organizational politics (who has the power today to get their way).

· Subjective management whims (I think, I believe, I feel, but mainly I want—regardless of objective facts).

· Situational knee-jerk reactions (due to something that broke, a mandate that came down, an audit that was failed, and so on)

· People with some cash to throw around (they have $ and “its burning a hole in their pockets” or can anyone say “spend-down”?).

The result though of abandoning strategic decision-making is that IT investment decisions will be sub-optimal and maybe even big losers—some examples includes:

· Investment “shelfware” (the seals on the packages of the software or hardware may never even get broken)

· Redundant technologies (that drain limited resources to operate and maintain them)

· Systems that are obsolete by the time they make it into production (because they were a bad idea to begin with)

· Failed IT projects galore (because they never had true organizational commitment and for the right reasons)

Why does strategic decision-making help avoid bad organizational investments?

1) Having a vision, a plan, and an enterprise architecture trumps ping-pong balling around in the firefight of the day, because the first is goal-oriented—linear and directed, and the second is issue-oriented—dictated by the problem du-jour, and generally leads to nowhere in particular.

2) Having a structured governance process with analysis of alternatives and well-thought out and transparent criteria, weightings, and rankings trumps throwing an investment dart into the dark and hoping that it hits a project with a real payoff.

3) Taking a strategic view driven by positive long-term outcomes for the organization trumps an operational view driven by short-term results for the individual.

4) Taking an enterprise solutions view that seeks sharing and economies of scale trumps an instance-by-instance approach, which results in gaps, redundancies, inefficiencies, and systems that can’t talk with each other.

5) Taking an organization view where information sharing and horizontal collaboration result in people working together for the greater organizational good, trumps functional views (vertical silos) where information is hoarded and the “us versus them attitude,” results in continuous power struggles over scare resources and decisions that benefits individuals or groups at the expense of the organization as a whole.

Certainly, we cannot expect that all decisions will be made under optimal conditions and follow “all the rules.” However, as leaders we must create the organizational structures, policies, processes, and clear roles and responsibilities to foster strategic decision-making versus a continued firefighting approach.

Understanding that organizations and people are imperfect and that we need to balance many competing interests from many stakeholders does not obviate the need to create the conditions for sounder decision-making and better organizational results. This is an IT leader's mandate for driving organizational excellence.

While we will never completely get rid of the politics and other sideline influences on how we make our investments, we can mitigate them through a process-driven organization approach that is based on a healthy dose of planning and governance. The pressure to give in to the daily crisis and catfight can be great that is why we need organizational structures to hold the line.

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December 12, 2009

EA Can Do It

A number of weeks ago, I was at a CTO Event in DC and got to hear from colleagues about their thoughts on various technologies and IT trends. Overall the exchange was great, and as always, I was deeply impressed with the wisdom and experience of these IT leaders.

However, one particular set of comments set me back in my chair a little. And that was on the topic of Enterprise Architecture. Apparently, a number of CTOs (from a relatively small number of agencies) had not had great success in their organizations with EA and were practically questioning it’s very existence in our IT universe. Yikes!

I believe some of the comments were to the effect (and this is not verbatim—I will put it euphemistically) that these individuals had never seen anything valuable from enterprise architecture—EVER—and that as far as they were concerned, it should be discontinued in their organizations, altogether.

In thinking about the stinging comments from some of the IT leaders, I actually felt bad for them that they had had negative experiences with a discipline like EA, which is such a powerful and transformative planning and governance framework when implemented correctly—with the value proposition of improving IT decision making and the end-user as the focal point for delivering valuable and actionable EA information and governance services—generally what I call User-centric Enterprise Architecture.

Right away after the negative comments, there were a number of CTOs that jumped up to defend EA, including me. My response was partially that just because some EA programs had not been successful (i.e. they were poorly implemented), did not mean that EA was not valuable when it was done right—and that there was indeed a way to build an organizations enterprise architecture as a true beacon for the organization to modernize, transform, and show continuous improvement. So please hold off from dismembering EA from our organizations.

Recently, I was further reassured that some organizations were getting EA, and getting it right, when I read a blog by Linda Cureton, the new CIO of NASA who wrote: NASA CIO: How to Rule the World of IT through Enterprise Architecture.

In the blog, Ms. Cureton first offers up a very nice, straightforward definition of EA:

“Let me step back a bit and offer a simple definition for Enterprise Architecture that is not spoken in the dribble of IT jargon. In simplest terms, it is a planning framework that describes how the technology assets of an organization connect and operate. It also describes what the organization needs from the technology. And finally, it describes the set of activities required to meet the organizational needs. Oh, and I should also say it operates in a context of a process for setting priorities, making decisions, informing those decisions, and delivering results called - IT Governance.”

Further, Ms. Cureton draws some parallels from a book titled How to Rule the World: Handbook for an Aspiring Dictator, by Andre de Gaillaume, as follows:

It is possible to manage IT as an Enterprise.

· You can use the Enterprise Architecture to plan and manage the kinder, safer, more cost effective IT world.

· Transformational projects will successful and deliver desired results.

· IT can be a key strategic enabler of NASA's [and other organizations] goals.”

Wow, this was great--an IT leader who really understands EA and sees it as the tool that it genuinely is for--to more effectively plan and govern IT and to move from day-to-day organizational firefighting to instead more strategic formulation and execution for tangible mission and end-user results.

While, I haven’t read the dictators handbook and do not aspire to draw any conclusions from it in terms of ruling the world, I do earnestly believe that no organization will be successful with their IT without EA. You cannot have an effective IT organization without a clear vision and plan as well as the mechanism to drive informed decision making from the plan and then being able to execute on it.

Success doesn't just happen, it is the result of brilliant planning and nurtured execution from dedicated and hardworking people.

Reading about NASA’s direction now, they may indeed be looking to the stars, but now, they also have their eyes focused on their EA.


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November 10, 2009

Supercapitalism and Enterprise Architecture

As a nation are we overworked? Are we just showing up, doing what we're told, and making the same mistakes again and again?

Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary and Professor at University of California at Berkeley, says that we are more than ever a nation of workaholics.

Reich’s book, Supercapitalism, talks about how we have to work harder to make ends meet for the following reasons:

  • Globalization—“our real incomes are under assault from technology and low-wage workers in other countries.”
  • Greater competition—“all barriers to entry have fallen, competition is more intense than ever, and if we don’t work hard, we may be in danger of losing clients, customers, or investors.”
  • Rapid pace of change—“today most people have no ability to predict what they’re going to be doing from year to year, and job descriptions are not worth the paper they’re written on because jobs are changing so fast.”

Reich says to temper our workaholic lifestyles, we need to “understand that the quality of work is much more important than the quantity.” Honestly, that doesn’t seem to answer the question, since quality (not just quantity) takes hard work and a lot of time too.

In terms of supercharged programs, I have seen enterprise architecture programs working "fast and furious," others that were steady, and still some that were just slow and sometimes to the point of "all stop" in terms of any productivity or forward momentum.

Unlike IT operations that have to keep the lights on, the servers humming, and phones working, EA tends to be considered all too often as pure “overhead” that can be cut at the slightest whim of budget hawks. This can be a huge strategic mistake for CIOs and organizational leaders who thus behave in a penny-wise and dollar foolish manner. Sure, operations keep the lights on, but EA ensures that IT investments are planned, strategically aligned, compliant, technically sound, and cost-effective.

A solid EA program takes us out of the day-to-day firefighting mode and operational morass, and puts the CIO and business leaders back in the strategic "driver's seat" for transforming and modernizating the organization.

In fact, enterprise architecture addresses the very concerns that Reich points to in our Supercapitalistic times: To address the big issues of globalization, competition, and the rapid pace of change, we need genuine planning and governance, not just knee jerk reactions and firefighting. Big, important, high impact problems generally don't get solved by themselves, but rather they need high-level attention, innovative thinking, and group problem solving, and general committment and resources to make headway. This means we can't just focus on the daily grind. We need to extricate ourselves and think beyond today. And that's exactly what real enterprise architecture is all about.

Recently, I heard some colleagues at a IT conference say that EA was all bluster and wasn't worth the work and investment. I strongly disagree. Perhaps, a poorly implemented architecture program may not be worth the paper it's plans are printed on. And unfortunately, there are too many of these faux enterprise architecture programs around and these give the rest a bad rap. However, a genuine user-centric enterprise architecture and IT governance program is invaluable in keeping the IT organization from running on a diet of daily chaos: not a good thing for the mission and business that IT supports.

Organizations can and will work smarter, rather than just harder, with strong enterprise architecture, sound IT governance, and sound business and IT processes. It the nature of planning ahead rather than just hoping for the best.


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November 1, 2009

Decoding Decision-Making

Decision-making is something we have to do every day as individuals and as organizations, yet often we end up making some very bad decisions and thus some costly mistakes.

Improving the decision-making process is critical to keeping us safe, sound, and stably advancing toward the achievement of our goals.

All too often decisions are made based on gut, intuition, politics, and subjective management whim. This is almost as good as flipping a coin or rolling a pair of dice.

Disciplines such as enterprise architecture planning and governance attempt to improve on the decision-making process by establishing a strategic roadmap and then guiding the organization toward the target architecture through governance boards that vet and validate decisions based on return on investment, risk mitigation, alignment to strategic business goals, and compliance to technical standards and architecture.

In essence, decisions are taken out of the realm of the “I think” or “I feel” phenomenon and into the order of larger group analysis and toward true information-based decision-making.

While no decision process is perfect, the mere presence of an orderly process with “quality gates” and gatekeepers helps to mitigate reckless decisions.

“Make Better Decisions,” an article in Harvard Business Review (HBR), November 2009, states, “In recent years, decision makers in both the public and private sectors have made an astounding number of poor calls.”

This is attributed to two major drivers:

Individuals going it alone: “Decisions have generally been viewed as the prerogative of individuals-usually senior executives. The process employed, the information used, the logic relied on, have been left up to them, in something of a black box. Information goes in [quantity and quality vary], decisions come out—and who knows what happens in between.”

A non-structured decision-making processes: “Decision-making has rarely been the focus of systematic analysis inside the firm. Very few organizations have ‘reengineered’ the decision. Yet there are just as many opportunities to improve decision making as to improve other processes.”

The article’s author, Thomas Davenport, who has a forthcoming book on decision-making, proposes four steps (four I’s) organizations can take to improve this process:

Identification—What decision needs to be made and which are most important?

Inventory—What are the factors or attributes for making each decision?

Intervention—What is the process, roles, and systems for decision-making?

Institutionalization—How do we establish sound decision-making ongoingly through training, measurement, and process improvement?

He acknowledges that “better processes won’t guarantee better decisions, of course, but they can make them more likely.”

It is interesting that Davenport’s business management approach is so closely aligned with IT management best practices such as enterprise architecture and capital planning and investment control (CPIC). Is shows that the two disciplines are in sync and moving together toward optimized decision-making.

One other point I’d like to make is that even with the best processes and intentions, organizations may stumble when it comes to decision making because they fail into various decision traps based on things like: groupthink, silo-thinking and turf battles, analysis paralysis, autocratic leadership, cultures where employees fear making mistakes or where innovation is discouraged or even frowned upon, and various other dysfunctional impediments to sound decision-making.

Each of these areas could easily be a discourse in and of themselves. The point however is that getting to better decision-making is not a simple thing that can be achieved through articulating a new processes or standing up a new governance board alone.

We cannot delegate good decision-making or write a cursory business case and voila the decision is a good one. Rather optimizing decision-making processes is an ongoing endeavor and not a one-time event. It requires genuine commitment, participation, transparency, and plenty of information sharing and collaboration across the enterprise.


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October 20, 2009

“The Happiness Myth” and Enterprise Architecture


Recently, I was reminded of an interesting article that appeared in The Wall Street Journal (20 Dec 2007) that what really matters in life is not happiness, but rather peace of mind.

Generally speaking, people “are consumed by the pursuit of happiness,” and this fact is codified in our very Declaration of Independence
that states: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that are among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

However, absolute happiness is often in conflict with the "reality on the ground".

There are some of the inherent conflicts we deal with in enterprise architecture (sort of like the Murphy's Law of EA):

Here are some typical user wants (often associated with problematic architectures):
  • A baseline, target, and transition plan without their having to provide virtually any input or to collaborate whatsoever.
  • An architecture roadmap that they do not have to actually follow or execute on.
  • A platform for information sharing and access to information 24/7, but they also want to hoard “their information”, and keep it secure and private, on a need-to-know only basis, which they subjectively decide.
  • A structured IT governance process to ensure sound IT investments for the organization, but also they want leeway to conduct their own affairs, their way, in which they buy want they want, when they want, how they want, from whomever they want, with whatever founds they can scrounge up.
  • A requirements generation and management process that captures and aligns specific functional requirements all the way up to the organization’s strategic plan, mandates and legislation, but that they don't have to be bothered with identifying, articulating, or aligning.


The world of EA is filled with conflicting user demands and polarizing directions from user that want and expect to have it all. While certainly, EA wants and strives to meet all reasonable user requirements and to satisfy the user community and “make them happy,” at a point there comes the realization that you can’t (no matter how hard you try) make everyone happy all of the time.

People want it all, want it now, and often when you give them what they want, they realize that it wasn’t “really” what they had wanted anyway.

So the way ahead is to understand and take into account your user requirements, but more importantly to do the “right” thing for the organization based on best practices, common sense, and initiatives that will truly drive improved performance and mission results.

The WSJ states, “Dad told me: “life isn’t built around ‘fun.’ It’s built around peace of mind. Maybe Dad sensed the paradox of happiness: those most desperate for it run a high risk of being the last to find it. That’s because they make foolish decisions. They live disorderly lives, always chasing the high of the moment.”

In User-centric EA, we don’t “chase the high of the moment,” or look to satisfy each and every user whim, but rather we keep the course to developing sound IT planning and governance and to enhancing organizational decision-making capabilities for our end users. EA is a discipline that ultimately strives to ensure peace of mind for the enterprise through the provision of vital "insight" and "oversight" functions.


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September 30, 2009

Conflict Management and Enterprise Architecture

What is conflict?

In the book Images of Organization by Gareth Morgan, the author states “Conflict arises whenever interests collide…whatever the reason, and whatever form it takes, its source rests in some perceived or real divergence of interests.”


Why does conflict occur?


Morgan continues: “People must collaborate in pursuit of a common task, yet are often pitted against each other in competition for limited resources, status, and career advancement.”


How does conflict manifest?


The conflicting dimensions of organization are most clearly symbolized in the hierarchical organization chart, which is both a system of cooperation, in that it reflects a rational subdivision of tasks, and a career ladder up which people are motivated to climb. The fact is there are more jobs at the bottom than at the top means that competition for the top places is likely to be keen, and that in any career race there are likely to be far fewer winners than losers.”


How does User-centric EA help Manage Conflict?


Enterprise architecture is a tool for resolving organizational conflict. EA does this in a couple of major ways:

  1. Information Transparency: EA makes business and technical information transparent in the organization. And as they say, “information is power”, so by providing information to everyone, EA becomes a ‘great equalizer’—making information equally available to those throughout the organization. Additionally, by people having information, they can better resolve conflict through informed decision-making.
  2. Governance: EA provides for governance. According to Wikipedia, “governance develops and manages consistent, cohesive policies, processes and decision-rights for a given area of responsibility.” As such, governance provides a mechanism to resolve conflicts, in an orderly fashion. For example, an IT Investment Review Board and supporting EA Review Board enables a decision process for authorizing, allocating, and prioritizing new IT investments, an otherwise highly contentious area for many sponsors and stakeholders in the organization.

Conflict is inevitable; however, EA can provide both information and governance to help manage and resolve conflict.


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September 29, 2009

Embracing Instability and Enterprise Architecture

Traditional management espouses that executives are supposed to develop a vision, chart a course for the organization, and guide it to that future destination. Moreover, everyone in the enterprise is supposed to pull together and sing off the same sheet of music, to make the vision succeed and become reality. However, new approaches to organizational management acknowledge that in today’s environment of rapid change and the many unknowns that abound, executives need to be far more flexible and adaptable, open to learning and feedback, and allow for greater individualism and creativity to succeed.

In the book Managing the Unknowable by Ralph Stacey, the author states that “by definition, innovative strategic directions take an organization into uncharted waters. It follows that no one can know the future destination of an innovative organization. Rather, that organization’s managers must create, invent, and discover their destination as they go.”

In an environment of rapid change, the leader’s role is not to rigidly control where the organization is going, but rather to create conditions that foster creativity and learning. In other words, leaders do not firmly set the direction and demand a “cohesive team” to support it, but rather they create conditions that encourage and promote people to “question everything and generate new perspectives through contention and conflict.” The organization is moved from "building on their strengths and merely adapting to existing market conditions, [to insted] they develop new strengths and at least partly create their own environments.”

An organization just sticking to what they do best and incrementally improving on that was long considered a strategy for organizational success; however, it is now understood as a recipe for disaster. “It is becoming clearer why so many organizations die young…they ‘stick to their knitting’ and do better and better what they already do well. When some more imaginative competitors come along and change the rules of the game, such over-adapted companies…cannot respond fast enough. The former source of competitive success becomes the reason for failure and the companies, like animals, become extinct.”

Organizations must be innovative and creative to succeed. “The ‘new science’ for business people is this: Organizations are feedback systems generating such complex behavior that cause-and-effect links are broken. Therefore, no individual can intend the future of that system or control its journey to that future. Instead what happens to an organization is created by and emerges from the self-organizing interactions between its people. Top managers cannot control this, but through their interventions, they powerfully influence this.

With the rapidly changing economic, political, social, and technological conditions in the world, “the future is inherently unpredictable.” To manage effectively then is not to set rigid plans and targets, but rather to more flexibly read, analyze, and adapt to the changes as they occur or as they can be forecast with reasonable certainly. “A ‘shared vision’ of a future state must be impossible to formulate, unless we believe in mystic insight.” “No person, no book, can prescribe systems, rules, policies, or methods that dependably will lead to success in innovative organizations. All managers can do it establish the conditions that enable groups of people to learn in each new situation what approaches are effective in handling it.”

For enterprise architecture, there are interesting implications from this management approach. Enterprise architects are responsible for developing the current and target architecture and transition plan. However, with the rapid pace of change and innovation and the unpredictability of things, we learn that “hard and fast” plans will not succeed, but rather EA plans and targets must remain guidelines only that are modified by learning and feedback and is response to the end-user (i.e User-centric). Secondly, EA should not become a hindrance to organizational innovation, creativity, and new paradigms for organizational success. EA needs to set standards and targets and develop plans and administer governance, but this must be done simultaneously with maintaining flexibility and harnessing innovation into a realtime EA as we go along. It’s not a rigid EA we need, but as one of my EA colleagues calls it, it’s an “agile EA”.


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