Is there an IT leader in the House?

True IT leadership means that those who are in charge of information technology really care about and drive the success of the mission, the satisfaction of the customers, and the well-being of their employees.

To me, these three critical leadership focus areas are tied to the areas of people, process, and technology.

People: The people are your people—your employees. This is the area of human capital that unfortunately many leaders say is important, but all too often remains mere lip service. We need to focus on providing an environment where our employees can thrive professionally and personally. Where there is challenge and growth. Where we match the right people to the right jobs. Where we provide ongoing training and the right tools for people to do their jobs effectively and efficiently. Where we treat people as human beings and not as inanimate economic objects that produces goods and services.

Process: The process is the mission and the business of our organization. As IT leaders, we need to ensure that our technology is aligned to the organization. Business drives technology, rather than doing technology for technology’s sake. Everything IT that we plan for, invest in, execute, support, secure, and measure needs to be linked to enabling mission success. IT should be providing solutions to mission requirements. The solutions should provide better information quality and information sharing; consolidation, interoperability, and component re-use of our systems, and standardization, simplification, and cost-efficiency of our technology—ALL to enable mission process effectiveness and efficiency.

Technology: The technology is the satisfaction we create for our customers in both the technology products and services that we provide to them. Our job is ensuring technology WOW for our customers in terms of them having the systems and services to do their jobs. We need to provide the right information to the right people at the right time, anywhere they need it. We must to service and support our IT customer with a white glove approach rather than with obstructionist IT bureaucracy. We shall find a way—whenever possible—to say yes or to provide an alternate solution. We will live by the adage of “the customer is always right”.

Recently, in reading the book. “The Scalpel and the Soul” by Dr Allan J. Hamilton, I was reminded that true IT leaders are driven by sincere devotion to mission, customer, and employee.

In the book, Dr. Hamilton recalls the convocation speech to his graduating class at Harvard Medical School by Professor Judah Folkman whose speech to a class of 114 news doctors was “Is There a Doctor in the House?”

Of course there was a doctor in the house, there was 114 doctors, but Professor Folkman was pointing out that “these days, patients were plagued by far too many physicians and too few doctors.” In other words, there are plenty of physicians, but there are few doctors “in whom you put your trust and your life”—those driven by sincere devotion and care for their patients, the success of their medical treatment, and their fellow practitioners.

While an IT leader is not a doctor, the genuine IT leader—like the real doctor—is someone who sincerely cares and acts in the best interests of the organization’s mission, their customers, and their people.

Just like when there is a doctor in the house, the patient is well cared for, so too when there is a genuine IT leader in the C-suite, the organization is enabled for success.

Is there an IT leader in the House?

How To Use Social Media Strategically

How To Use Social Media Strategically in the Federal Government on Howcast

This is an outstanding 3 minute video on Social Media from General Services Administation (GSA) and HowCast.com

The video provides 6 "how-to" steps to implementing social media for the purposes of collaboration, information sharing, information exchange, keeping pace of fast moving events in real-time, and harnessing the collective ingenuity of the public to support mission.

As the video states, "The key is to focus on the organization's goals."

How To Use Social Media Strategically

Andy Blumenthal Presents How Enterprise Architecture is Transforming Government (June 2009)

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Andy Blumenthal Presents How Enterprise Architecture is Transforming Government (June 2009)

View more Microsoft Word documents from ablumen.

Andy Blumenthal Presents How Enterprise Architecture is Transforming Government (June 2009)

“Soft Hands” Leadership

Conventional wisdom has it that there are two primary types of leaders: one is focused on the work (task-oriented) and the other is focused on the relationships (people-oriented). Of course, the exceptional leader can find the right balance between the two. Usually though it is the people skills that are short-changed in lieu of getting the job done.

Personally, I am a firm believer in the military doctrine of “Mission first, people always!”—Although, I am certain that some leaders even in the military are better at exemplifying this than others.

With the global financial downturn, there is an interesting article in Harvard Business Review titled “The Right Way to Close an Operation,” May 2009 that sheds some light on this leadership topic.

In this article, Kenneth Freeman advocates for a “soft hands” approach when closing or shrinking an operation. This approach calls for leadership to “treat employees with dignity, fairness, and respect—the way you would want to be treated.”

Wow!!! This is great--A human-centric approach to leadership.

Unfortunately some unconsciously believe that being tough on mission means being tough on people too. However, there is no need to "flick the whip." There is another way. We can embrace people as human beings, work with them, have compassion on them, treat them well, and lead them towards mission delivery.

It doesn’t have to be supervisors versus employees--different sides of the bargaining table. It can be in most instances people striving together for organizational success.

For me, this ties right in to my vision for enterprise architecture to have a human capital perspective. Human capital is critical to mission delivery. We must not focus exclusively on process and technology and forget the critical people aspect of organizational performance. A stool with only two legs (process and technology) without the third (people) will assuredly fall.

Freeman states that even when doing difficult things like downsizing we can still treat people humanly, the way we would want to be treated. He says: “reducing a workforce is painful, but you can do it in such a way that people will someday say, ‘you know I once worked for Company X. I didn’t like the fact that they shut my plant down, but I still think it’s a good company.’”

Here’s some tips from Freeman as I understand them:

- Address the personal issues for the employees—why they are losing their jobs, how the closure will affect them, what you will do to help them land on their feet…

- Communicate early and often—“People need to hear a message at least six times to internalize it.”

- Get out there—“Be visible and personal. A closure or a downsizing is not an excuse for leaders to go into hiding.”

-Take responsibility—“The leader should take personal responsibility for the organization’s behavior.”

- Be honest, but kind—“Explain that the decision is being made for the sake of the overall business not because the people who are leaving have done a bad job.”

- Treat everyone fairly—“who stays and who goes should be decided on an objective basis.”

- Help people go on—“help people find jobs.”

- Maintain a quality focus—“leaders should regularly remind everyone of the importance of quality and keep measuring and celebrating it.”

Freeman goes on with other sensible advice on how to not only treat employees well, but also customers and suppliers “like valued partners.” He has a refreshing perspective on delivering results, while maintaining human dignity.

Here's the critical point:

Having a “soft hands” approach to people doesn’t mean that you are soft on mission. That can never happen. But it does mean, we remember that delivery of mission is through our professional relationships with people—employees, customers, suppliers, partners, shareholders and more.

Treating people with dignity, respect, and fairness will positively generate mission delivery for the organization.

“Soft Hands” Leadership

Disruptive Technologies

When companies get cozy, the marketplace gets innovative and from out of nowhere...a disruptive technology upends things.

We've seen this happen countless of times in big ways.

In the auto industry, 50 years ago neither GM nor Ford would have ever dreamed that they would lose their virtual monopoly on the U.S. auto industry to foreign car companies that would dislodge them with compact vehicles and hybrid engine technologies.

More recently in the music industry, Apple seized the day by combining functionality, stylishness and price on their iPod player with an accessible online iTunes music store.

More generally, the whole world of e-Commerce has stolen much of the show from the brick and mortar retail outlets with internet marketing, online transaction processing, supply chain management and electronic funds transfer.

Now, another disruption is occurring in the computer market. For years, the computer industry has made every effort to provide more raw computing power, memory, and functionality with every release of their computers. And Moore’s law encapsulated this focus with predictions of doubling every two years.

Now, on the scene comes the Netbook—a simpler, less powerful, less capable computing device that is taking off. Yes, this isn’t the first time that we’ve had a drive toward smaller, sleeker devices (phones, computers, and so on), but usually the functionality is still growing or at the very least staying the same. But with Netbooks smaller truly does mean less capable.

Wired magazine, March 2009, states “ The Netbook Effect: Dinky keyboard. Slow chip. Tiny hard drive. And users are going crazy for them.”

How did we get here?

“For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, which customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did.”

So what happened?

“What netbook makers have done is turn back the clock: Their machine perform the way laptops did four years ago. And it turns out that four years ago (more or less) is plenty.”

“It turns out that about 95%...can be accomplished through a browser…Our most common tasks—email, Web surfing, watching streaming videos—require very little processing power.”

The netbook manufactures have disrupted the computer market by recognizing two important things:

1. Computer users have adequate computing power for their favorite tasks and what they really want now is more convenience and at a price that says buy me.
2. Cloud computing is no longer an idea full of hot air, but it is a technology that is here now and can do the job for consumers. We can get our applications over the web and do not have to run them on our client machines. We can afford to have computers that do less, because the cloud can do more!

The result?

Foreign companies are running away with the Netbook market. “By the end of 2008, Asustek had sold 5 million netooks, and other brands together had sold 10 million…In a single year, netbooks had become 7 percent of the world’s entire laptop market. Next year it will be 12%.”

“And when Asustek released the Eee notbook, big firms like Dell, HP, and Apple did nothing for months.” They were taken off guard by miscalculation and complacency.

The future?

Of course, the big boys of computing are hoping that the netbook will be a “secondary buy—the little mobile thing you get after you already own a normal size laptop. But it’s also possible, that the next time your replacing an aging laptop, you’ll walk away into the store and wonder, ‘why exactly am I paying so much for a machine that I use for nothing but email and the Web?’ And Microsoft and Intel and Dell and HO and Lenovo will die a little bit inside that day.”

Implications for CIOs?

• End complacency and always be on the lookout for disruptive technologies and ways of doing business. There is always a better way!
• Hardware becomes a commodity over time and supplying the infrastructure for the organization is moving the way that electricity generation did at the turn of the 20^th century—to outside vendors that can do it more effectively and efficiently.
• Cloud computing means that commonly used software applications are available over the internet and can be provide the foundation business functionality for the organization.

The important future value add from the Office of CIO is in IT strategy, planning, governance, and mission-focused solutions. We need CIOs that are true leaders, innovative, and focused on the business and not just on the technology.

Disruptive Technologies

The Need for Control and Enterprise Architecture

Human beings have many needs and these have been well documented by prominent psychologists like Abraham Maslow.

At the most basic level, people have physiological needs for food, water, shelter, and so on. Then “higher-level” needs come into play including those for safety, socializing, self-esteem, and finally self-actualization.

The second order need for safety incorporates the human desire for feeling a certain degree of control over one’s life and that there is, from the macro perspective, elements of predictability, order, and consistency in the world.

Those of us who believe in G-d generally attribute “real” control over our lives and world events to being in the hands of our creator and sustainer. Nevertheless, we see ourselves having an important role to play in doing our part—it is here that we strive for control over our lives in choosing a path and working hard at it. A lack of any semblance of control over our lives makes us feel like sheer puppets without the ability to affect things positively or negatively. We are lost in inaction and frustration that whatever we do is for naught. So the feeling of being able to influence or impact the course of our lives is critical for us as human beings to feel productive and a meaningful part of the universe that we live in.

How does this impact technology?

Mike Elgan has an interesting article in Computerworld, 2 January 2009, called “Why Products Fail,” in which he postulates that technology “makers don’t understand what users want most: control.”

Of course, technical performance is always important, but users also have a fundamental need to feel in control of the technology they are using. The technology is a tool for humans and should be an extension of our capabilities, rather than something like in the movie Terminator that runs rogue and out of the control of the human beings who made them.

When do users feel that the technology is out of their control?

Well aside from getting the blue screen of death, when they are left waiting for the computer to do something (especially the case when they don’t know how long it will be) and when the user interface is complicated, not intuitive, and they cannot find or easily understand how to do what they want to do.

Elgan says that there are a number of elements that need to be built into technology to help user feel in control.

Consistetency—“predictability…users know what will happen when they do something…it’s a feeling of mastery of control.”

Usability—“give the user control, let them make their own mistakes, then undo the damage if they mess something up” as opposed to the “Microsoft route—burying and hiding controls and features, which protects newbies from their own mistakes, but frustrates the hell out of experienced users.”

Simplicity—“insist on top-to-bottom, inside-and-outside simplicity,” rather than “the company that hides features, buries controls, and groups features into categories to create the appearance of few options, with actually reducing options.”

Performance/Stability—“everyone hates slows PCs. It’s not the waiting. It’s the fact that the PC has wrenched control from the user during the time that the hourglass is displayed.”

Elgan goes on to say that vendors’ product tests “tend to focus on enabling user to ‘accomplish goals…but how the user feels during the process is more important than anything else.”

As a huge proponent of user-centricity, I agree that people have an inherent need to feel they are in some sort of control in their lives, with the technology they use, and over the direction that things are going in (i.e. enterprise architecture).

However, I would disagree that how the user feels is more important than how well we accomplish goals; mission needs and the ability of the user to execute on these must come first and foremost!

In performing our mission, users must be able to do their jobs, using technology, effectively and efficiently. So really, it’s a balance between meeting mission requirements and considering how users feel in the process.

Technology is amazing. It helps us do things better, faster, and cheaper that we could ever do by ourselves. But we must never forget that technology is an extension of ourselves and as such must always be under our control and direction in the service of a larger goal.

The Need for Control and Enterprise Architecture

MSNBC on the ATF and Enterprise Architecture

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Al Roker: "Armed in America"--The ATF in Action:

Enterprise architecture has to live in the real world, and in the real world a technology is any tool that gets the job done. Instead of being driven only by whiz-bang technologies, we need to focus on what works for the mission. And while this certainly includes traditional information technology, it also must take into account people, training, intel, equipment, and so forth. In this video from MSNBC, we see a focus on the mission of the ATF, and this is certainly part of any business architecture for an organization. Architecture information products do not only take the form of inventories of items, models of processes, and charts of intricate detail, but they can also take the form of video, audio, and other such artificats that documentan an organization and the way it performs.

MSNBC on the ATF and Enterprise Architecture

Balancing Strategy and Operations and The Total CIO

How should a CIO allocate their time between strategy and operations?

Some CIOs are all operations; they are concerned solely with the utility computing aspects of IT like keeping the desktops humming and the phones ringing. Availability and reliability are two of their key performance measurement areas. These CIOs are focused on managing the day-to-day IT operations, and given some extra budget dollars, will sooner spend them on new operational capabilities to deploy in the field today.

Other CIOs are all strategy; they are focused on setting the vision for the organization, aligned closely to the business, and communicating the way ahead. Efficiency and effectiveness are two of their key performance measurement areas. These CIOs are often set apart from the rest of the IT division (i.e. the Office of the CIO focuses on the Strategy and the IT division does the ops) and given some extra budget dollars, will likely spend them on modernization and transformation, providing capabilities for the end-user of tomorrow.

Finally, the third category of CIOs, balances both strategy and operations. They view the operations as the fundamentals that need to be provided for the business here and now. But at the same time, they recognize that the IT must evolve over time and enable future capabilities for the end-user. These CIOs, given some extra budget dollars, have to have a split personality and allocate funding between the needs of today and tomorrow.

Government Technology, Public CIO Magazine has an article by Liza Lowery Massey on “Balancing Strategy with Tactics Isn’t Easy for CIOs.”

Ms. Massey advocates for the third category, where the CIO balances strategy and operations. She compares it to “have one foot in today and one in tomorrow…making today’s decisions while considering tomorrow’s impacts.”

How much time a CIO spends on strategy versus operations, Ms. Massey says is based on the maturity of the IT operations. If ops are unreliable or not available, then the CIO goes into survival mode—focused on getting these up and running and stable. However, when IT operations are more mature and stable, then the CIO has more ability to focus on the to-be architecture of the organization.

For the Total CIO, it is indeed a delicate balance between strategy and operations. Focus on strategy to the detriment of IT operations, to the extent that mission is jeopardized, and you are toast. Spend too much time, energy, and resources on IT operations, to the extent that you jeopardize the strategy and solutions needed to address emerging business and end-user requirements, and you will lose credibility and quickly be divorced by the business.

The answer is the Total CIO must walk a fine line. Mission cannot fail today, but survivability and success of the enterprise cannot be jeopardized either. The Total CIO must walk and chew gum at the same time!

Additionally, while this concept is not completely unique to CIOs, and can be applied to all CXOs, CIOs have an added pressure on the strategy side due to the rapid pace of emerging technology and its effects on everything business.

Balancing Strategy and Operations and The Total CIO

Why a New Blog Called the Total CIO?

As you all know, I have been leading and promoting the concept of User-centric Enterprise Architecture for some time now.

After hundreds of blog posts and numerous articles, interviews, and speeches, I believe it is time to expand the core principles of User-centric EA to encompass all that a CIO can and should do to implement best practices that facilitate total mission success.

Thus, the concept of the "Total CIO".

• The Total CIO is mission-driven. He or she never compromises on delivering IT solutions that meet business requirements. In today's world this means capturing and managing customer requirements, synthesizing business and IT for effective strategy as well as efficient tactical implementation.
  
• The Total CIO is holistically minded. He/she employs best practices from various disciplines (IT, business process reengineering, human capital, etc.) to move the mission forward through infomation technology. This quality speaks to innovation, expansiveness, and thinking outside the box without ever losing sight of the goal.
• The Total CIO is customer-centric. He/she focuses on making it easier for people to use technology. That means he/she is focused on helping people deliver on the mission. This means that rather than speaking in jargon and creating shelfware, he/she delivers useful and usable information and technology to benefit everyone from the CEO to front-line personnel.

I look forward to your comments and input.

Why a New Blog Called the Total CIO?

To Be A CIO and Enterprise Architecture

Public CIO Magazine, June/July 2008, has some interesting articles on what it takes to be a next generation CIO (and many of these have to do with enterprise architecture).

Here are some tips (adapted from Public CIO):

• Develop your EA and IT Governance Capabilities—one of the first moves of Michael Locatis, the CIO of Colorado, was “hiring an enterprise architecture team leader and the development of new governance structures.” This is critical in effectively planning and change managing the consolidation of IT. In Colorado it means uniting “20 disparate IT departments into a single citywide Technology Services Division.”
• Be a strategist—Liza Massey, CEO of The CIO collaborative, a Las Vegas-based consultancy believes that a “CIO needs to make the leap from being a technologist to being a strategist [what EA planning is all about!]…’you have to be seen as a peer working for the good of the organization, not as the chief geek.’” She says, “if you know the version number of the operating system running on your mainframe, you’re probably not a CIO.”
• Understand that mission drives technology—Pat Schambach, retired CIO of the Secret Service, ATF, and the TSA said “it was his ability to understand his organization’s business imperatives that made him CIO material.” Pat states about the Service, “they wanted someone who knew the mission well and could bring technology to bear against that mission.” Again, this is good EA and IT governance in practice: where business drives technology and not doing technology for technology’s sake.
• Focus on business processes—Vivek Kundra, the CTO of Washington DC believes that “The key is to focus on the business process.” He stated, “My approach is to go after the core of the problem, to look at how the employees do their jobs and then look for how we can affect change.” Again, this is EA synthesizing business and technology to satisfy mission and end-user needs and requirements.
• “Behave like an enterprise”—Dave Wennergren, Deputy CIO for the Department of Defense and prior CIO of the Navy, said “we have to behave like an enterprise. We don’t need 50 smart card solutions or 50 collaboration tools.” He believes “the enterprise can be responsible for tools everyone uses, freeing up agency developers to work on tools specific to their needs.” In other words, we can leverage enterprise architecture and IT governance to develop enterprise solutions that are cost effective and efficient, but at the same time remain nimble in meeting niche or localized needs.
• Be able to translate business to technology and vice versa—Alan Shark, executive director for the Public Technology Institute said, “I’m seeing a big shift from issues that were purely technology to issues have much more to do with IT governance and leadership—being a translator between the technologists who work in the trenches and the politicians or the [higher-level] people who just want to hear the facts.” Again, EA plays a critical role here in synthesizing business and technology to enable better IT decision making for the mission/business.
• Leadership skills—In the latest survey of the National Association of State CIOs, the traits that rose to the top for CIO success: “communication skills, negotiation skills, being able to collaborate and work across the agencies, to work with their executive team.” Laura Fucci, the CIO of Clark County Nevada (home to the Las Vegas strip) echoes these sentiments for a CIO and talks in terms of team building [and networking], being a consensus builder, improving customer service (ITIL), studying metrics, and good project management.

A few other traits worth mentioning from David Wennergren, from DoD, is continuous learning and studying and driving best practices. This again ties strongly to enterprise architecture which builds the target architecture, transition plan, and IT strategic plan, bringing together the best practices from inside and outside the organization to move it steadily forward.

Clearly, the enterprise architecture is the foundation for a successful CIO and the organization he/she serves.

To Be A CIO and Enterprise Architecture

Strategy and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture develops the organization’s IT strategic plan and influences its business strategic plan. In order to do this, EA itself must have a strategic roadmap.

Harvard Business Review, April 2008, states that “companies that don’t have a simple and clear statement of strategy are likely to fall into the sorry category of those that have failed to execute their strategy or, worse, those that never had one. In an astonishing number of organizations, executives, frontline employees, and all those in between are frustrated because no clear strategy exists for the company or its lines of business.”

Elements of a strategic plan

What are the elements of a strategic plan?

1. Mission— “why we exist;” this is the purpose of the organization
2. Values—“what we believe in and how we will behave”
3. Vision—“what we want to be
4. Strategy—“What pour competitive game plan will be; this includes the following: A) Objectives—what we want to achieve: goals and objectives B) Scope—“the domain of the business; the part of the landscape in which the firm will operate.” C) Advantage—the means or initiatives that define how you will achieve your objectives; “what your firm will do differently or better than others,” defines your competitive advantage.
5. Balanced scorecard—“how we will monitor and implement that plan” A strategic plan for EA
   According to the American Management Association, the mission statement defines what the ultimate purpose of the organization is. It tells who you are, what you are, what you do, who do you serve, and why do you exist.
   The mission statement takes the form of: The [blank] is a [blank] that [produces blank] for [blank] to [help blank].
   For example, the mission statement for enterprise architecture:
   The [enterprise architecture program] is an [office of the CIO] that [develops information products and governance services] for [the employees of ABC organization] to [improve decision-making].
   The values of EA are: driving measurable results, aligning technology with the business, information-sharing and accessibility, service interoperability and component reuse, technology standardization and simplification, and information security.
   The vision of EA is to make information transparent to enable better decision-making.
   The strategy provides the conceptual way you will pursue your mission and vision.
   “Defining the objective, scope, and advantage requires trade-offs, which Porter identified as fundamental to strategy.” For example, a growth or market size strategy may obviate profitability, or a lower price strategy may hinder fashion and fit. The point is that an organization cannot be everything to everybody! Something has got to give.
   So for example, in EA, we must trade off the desire to be and do all, with the reality that we must focus on entire enterprise. Therefore, we distinguish ourselves from segment architecture and solutions architecture. In EA, we focus on strategic outcomes and delegate line of business architectures and systems architectures to the lines of business and solution developers.
   Finally, EA implements a balanced scorecard by instituting mechanisms for monitoring and implementing its plans. These include performance metrics for both information products and governance services.
   In sum, to get a meaningful EA plan in place, we have to answer these fundamental elements of strategy for the EA program itself.

Strategy and Enterprise Architecture

The Gung Ho Organization and Enterprise Architecture

User-centric EA helps lead to a "gung ho" successful enterprise.

In the book Gung Ho by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles, the authors offer 3 tips for motivating people. They include:

• Work has to be understood as important
• It has to lead to a well understood and shared goal
• Values have to guide plans, decisions, and actions

User centric EA is a proponent that an organization cannot be successful in spite its people, but rather it has to be successful through its people. And so, the adversarial relationship that management often sets up with employees, unions, shareholder activists etc. is not beneficial to meeting the mission needs that it's trying to achieve.

In user centric EA, the best way for any organization to achieve its goals is to motivate, inspire, and develop a shared vision with all the organizational actors. Part of developing that unity of mission and vision is to create a strong organizational culture, identity, and values.

The Gung Ho Organization and Enterprise Architecture

First Things First and Enterprise Architecture

In the book “First Things First” by Stephen Covey, the author describes an important dilemma of what’s important to us in life versus how we actually spend our time. Covey uses the metaphor of the clock and the compass to explain this.

• The clock—“our commitments, appointments, schedules, goals, and activities—what we do with, and how we manage our time.”
• The compass—“our vision, values, principles, mission, conscience, and direction—what we feel is important and how we lead our lives.”

The idea here is that we “painstakingly climb the ‘ladder of success’ rung by rung—the diploma, the late nights, the promotions—only to discover as we reached the top rung, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

“Absorbed in the ascent, we left a trail of shattered relationships or missed moments of deep, rich living in the wake of the intense overfocused effort. In the race up the rungs we simply did not take the time to do what really mattered most.”
What is really important?

Covey sums it up nicely, as follows:

• To live—our physical needs (“food, clothing, shelter, economic well-being, health”)
• To love—our social needs (“to relate to other people, to belong, to love, to be loved”)
• To learn—our mental needs (“to develop and to grow”)
• To live a legacy—our spiritual needs (“to have a sense of meaning, purpose, personal congruence, and contribution” and most important of all to serve and sacrifice for the one almighty G-d)

In case you don’t recognize it, these align nicely to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

http://usercentricea.blogspot.com/2007/08/maslows-hierarchy-of-needs-and.html

Maslow “in his last years, revised his earlier theory and acknowledged that the peak experience was not “self-actualization, but “self-transcendence,” or living for a higher purpose than self.

George Bernard Shaw put it this way:

“This is the true joy in life…being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one…being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy…I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can…I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It’s a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Covey says it this way:

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

As an enterprise architect, who works everyday to build a better organization, with efficient and effective business processes, timely and meaningful information supporting the business, and information technology solutions that drive mission execution, I thought it was important to put this important job in perspective. Because in order to be effective in the role as an enterprise architect, we have to realize that “balance and synergy” among the four needs—physical, social, mental, and spiritual—are imperative.

As Covey states: “we tend to see them [these needs] as separate ‘compartments’ of life. We think of ‘balance’ as running from one area to another fast enough to spend time in each one of a regular basis [or not!]…but [this] ignores the reality of their powerful synergy. It’s where…we find true inner balance, deep fulfillment, and joy.”

First Things First and Enterprise Architecture