Kaizen and Enterprise Architecture

User-Centric Enterprise Architecture and Kaizen are blood brothers — both are dedicated to improvement.

I love Kaizen! Kaizen is the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. Kaizen seeks “change for the better” and has been adopted by many companies in Japan as their equivalent of Six Sigma or Total Quality Management (TQM). Toyota is one of the best known and often cited examples of successfully implementing Kaizen; they have made kaizen part and parcel of their auto production process. Kaizen is an enterprise-wide endeavor. In a kaizen environment, the organization experiments to find better ways of doing things and then when these superior ways are found, they become the new standard throughout the organization.

In user-centric EA, there is also a focus on standards, integration, and process improvement. In EA, these are facilitated by the EA knowledge base of business and technical information, the analysis of problem areas and identification of gaps, redundancies, inefficiencies, and opportunities, and the institutionalization of regular and meaningful planning and good governance for maximizing the value of investments to the enterprise.

While kaizen is often associated with improvement to production systems including quality control, testing, and assurance, it is also a way of approaching work, education, relationships, and life — it’s when one is constantly asking “how can I do better” and actually following through (not like the typical New Year’s resolutions).

To me, EA is similar to kaizen in that it seeks to capture information, analyze it, and find ways to improve things. In EA, this search for continual improvement manifests itself by filling information gaps for users, eliminating organizational stovepipes, delivering IT solutions that meet requirements, consolidating redundant systems, and facilitating business process reengineering or improvement.

Do you view EA as a form of kaizen? How do you use EA to improve organizational processes and functions?

Kaizen and Enterprise Architecture