August 10, 2007

Bureaucracy and Its Impact on EA (and vice versa!)

Bureaucracy dulls even Enterprise Architecture, but EA fights back and unleashes innovation, spontaneity, and the human spirit.

Bureaucracy in organizations is an outgrowth of its being viewed, designed, and operated as a machine. The great sociologist, Max Weber, noted that modern organizations, that run like machines, tend to be very bureaucratic in nature, with strict hierarchies and structures. Frederick Taylor’s Time and Motion Studies advanced the mechanistic view of the organization and the production line mentality of the workplace, by promoting the division of labor and the highly monotonous, standardized work routines of laborers.

Treating organizations (and their people) as machines has a dehumanizing effect. While it is designed for unbending structure and for achieving predetermined performance goals, it creates endless barriers and obstacles to handling new challenges and adjusting to changes. In this type of super-strict organizational structure, even fields like EA (and its practitioners), which are designed to manage change, can be strangled by the embedded bureaucracy.

In bureaucratic enterprises, issues do not get addressed and resolved at the lowest levels where they are first encountered and can be handled most efficiently by those with subject matter expertise. Instead they get pushed up the chain of command, where ingrained organizational silos, competing interests, and empire building hamper an effective response. In frustration, management throws their hands up and assigns the issues to working groups or task forces or consultants who are assigned to try and deal with change. But these “outside groups” too, even if they can grasp the complexity of the issues, cannot effectively resolve them due to the barriers to organizational change that exist in the organization.

Despite the best intentions of all, bureaucracy is typical in large businesses and in government as well.

In user-centric EA, the impact of mechanistic organizations and bureaucracy is recognized as an impediment to change and growth of the enterprise, the ability of the organization to meet its full operating potential, and the valuation of its people as its greatest asset. EA is dedicated though to unleashing human capability and building a better organization for the future.

How does EA do this? By capturing and analyzing the as-is environment, and formulating a to-be environment and transition plan, EA not only shows the organization where its gaps, redundancies and inefficiencies are, but also facilitates a proactive solution to resolving them.

Further, EA provides two valuable assets to facilitate organizational change. The first is that EA provides business and technical information to all levels of the organization. This information can be used to enable decision-making by all. Secondly, EA provides a mechanism for governance, so that there is a structure and process for enterprise decisions to get made across traditional stovepipes.

By envisioning what could be, rather than just what is, EA challenges the status quo (even a highly mechanistic one) and continues to chip away at it, slowly but surely—working to eliminate stovepipes, build integration, interoperability, information sharing, and an open environment where people can innovate, create, and truly contribute to its success.


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