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”.

Embracing Instability and Enterprise Architecture

Rational Decision Making and Enterprise Architecture

In the book Images of Organization by Gareth Morgan, the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon is cited as exploring the parallels between human and organization decision making, as follows:

“Organizations can never be completely rational, because their members have limited information processing abilities…people

• usually have to act on the basis of incomplete information about possible courses of action and their consequences


• are able to explore only a limited number of alternatives relating to any given decision, and


• are unable to attach accurate values to outcome

...In contrast to the assumptions made in economics about the optimizing behavior of individuals, he concluded that individuals and organizations settle for a ‘bounded rationality’ of a good enough decision based on simple rules of thumb and limited search and information.”

While EA provides a way ahead for the organization, based on Herbert Simon explanation, we learn that there is really no 100% right answers. Organizations, like individuals, have limited ability to plan for the future, since they cannot adequately analyze potential outcomes of decisions in an uncertain environment with limited information.

Architects and the organizations they serve must recognize that the best laid plans are based on bounded rationality, and there is no "right" or "wrong" answers, just rational planning and due diligence.

Rational Decision Making and Enterprise Architecture

Taking the Politics out of Enterprise Decision Making

Some people say power is primarily exerted through military might (“hard power”), others says it is through use of diplomacy—communications, economic assistance, and investing in the global good (“soft power”). Then, there is a new concept of employing the optimal mix of military might and diplomacy (“smart power”).

It’s interesting to me how the Department of Defense—military approach—and the Department of State—diplomatic approach—is as much alive and well in our enterprises as it is in the sphere of world politics to get what we want.

At work, for example, people vie—some more diplomatically and some more belligerently—for resources and influence to advance their agendas, programs, projects, and people. This is symptomatic of the organizational and functional silos that continue to predominate in our organizations. And as in the world of politics, there are often winners and losers, rather than winners and winners. Those who are the “experts” in the arts of diplomacy and war (i.e. in getting what they want) get the spoils, but often at the expense of what may be good for the organization as a whole.

Instead of power politics (hard, soft, or smart), organizations need to move to more deliberate, structured, and objective governance mechanisms. Good governance is defined more by quantifiable measures than by qualitative conjecture. Sound governance is driven by return on investment, risk mitigation, strategic business alignment, and technical compliance rather than I need, want, like, feel, and so forth. Facts need to rule over fiction. Governance should not be a game of power politics.

Henry Mintzberg, the well-known management scholar, identified three mechanisms for managers to exert influence in the organization (Wall Street Journal, 17 August 2009):

1. Managing action—“managers manage actions directly. They fight fires. They manage projects. They negotiate contracts.” They get things done.

2. Managing people—“managers deal with people who take the action, so thy motivate them and they build teams and they enhance the culture and train them and do things to get people to take more effective actions.”

3. Managing information—“managers manage information to drive people to tale action—through budgets and objectives and delegating tasks and designing organization structure.”

It is in the third item—managing information—that we have the choice of building sincere business cases and creating a genuine call to action or to devolve into power politics, exerting hard, soft, and smart influence to get what we want, when we want it, and how we want it.

When information is managed through the exertion of power, it can be skewed and distorted. Information can be manipulated, exaggerated, or even buried. Therefore, it is imperative to build governance mechanisms that set a level playing field for capturing, creating, calculating, and complying with a set of objective parameters that can be analyzed and evaluated in more absolute terms.

When we can develop decision support systems and governance mechanisms that take the gut, intuition, politics, and subjective management whim out of the process, we will make better and more productive decisions for the enterprise.

Taking the Politics out of Enterprise Decision Making

Executives, One Foot In and One Foot Out

The last thing any executive should be doing is getting caught up in the weeds of management. The executive needs to lead and define the organizational strategy and the management team needs to execute. The executive is the link between what needs to get done (stakeholders’ needs) for the stakeholders and getting it done (management execution) through the organization’s people, process, and technology.

How does the executive perform this linking role?

Not by looking myopically inside the organization, and not by jetting around the globe shaking hands and kissing babies. Peter Drucker said “ The chief executive officer (CEO) is the link between the Inside that is ‘the organization,’ and the Outside of society, economy, technology, markets, and customers. “

In Harvard Business Review, May 2009, A. G. Lafley the CEO of Proctor & Gamble see’s that the CEO’s job is to “link the external world with the internal organization.”

The executive is the bridge between inside and outside the organization. And by having one foot in each, he/she is able to cross the artificial boundaries and bring vital stakeholder requirements in and carry organizational value back out.

Lafley breaks down the CEO’s role into four key areas, which I would summarize as follows:

• BUSINESS SCOPE: Determining “the business we are in” and not in.  No organization can be everything to everybody. We need to determine where we will compete and where we will withdraw. GE’s Jack Welsh used to insist on working only in those markets where GE could be either #1 or #2. Drucker’s view is that “performing people are allocated to opportunities rather than only to problems.”
  
• STAKEHOLDER PRIORITIZATION: “Defining and interpreting the meaningful outside”–this is really about identifying who are our stakeholders and how do we prioritize them?
  
• SETTING THE STRATEGY: Balancing “yield in the present with necessary investment in the future.” Genuine leaders don’t just milk the organization in the short term, but seek to deliver reasonable results immediately while investing for future performance. Lafley states “We deliver in the short term, we invest in and plan for the midterm, and we place experimental bets for the long term.”
  
• ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE: “Shaping values and standards.” Lafley argues that “the CEO is uniquely positioned to ensure that a company’s purpose, values, and standards are relevant for the present and the future.” Of course, the culture and values need to guide the organization towards what matters most to it, to meeting its purpose, and satisfying its stakeholders.
  

To me, the Drucker-Lafley view on the CEO as a bridge between boundaries inside and outside the organization, can be extended a step down in the organization to other “chief” roles. The CEO’s vision and strategy to deliver value to the stakeholder to the role is fulfilled in part by the chief information officer (CIO) and chief technology officer (CTO). Together, the CIO and CTO marry needs of the business with the technology to bring them to fruition. Within the organization, the CIO is “outward” facing toward the needs of the business and the CTO is “inward” facing to technology enablement. Together, like two sides of the same coin, they execute from the IT perspective for the CEO.

Similarly, the chief enterprise architect (CEA), at the next rung—supporting the CIO/CTO, is also working to span boundaries—in this case, it is to technically interoperate the organization internally and with external partners The chief enterprise architect works to realize the vision of the CEO and the execution strategy of the CIO/CTO.

The bridge the CEO builds links the internal and external boundaries of the organization by defining stakeholders, scope, business strategy, and organizational culture. The CIO/CTO build on this and create the strategy to align business and technology The CEA takes that decomposes it into business, information, and technological components, defining and linking business functions, information flows, and system enablers to architect technology to the business imperative.

Three levels of executives—CIO, CIO/CTO, and CEA, three bridges—inside/outside the organization, business/technology sides of the organization, and business process/information flows/technologies within. Three delivery mechanisms to stakeholders—one vision and organizational strategy, one technical strategy and execution, one architecture plan to deliver through technology.

Executives, One Foot In and One Foot Out

Master of Paradox and the Enterprise Architect

As enterprise architects, we need to have clarity of vision to see what is and to chart a way ahead for the organization. Yet, we live amidst polarities and paradoxes, which are challenges for every enterprise architect to see through.

In the book The Empty Raincoat, by Charles Handy, the author identifies nine paradoxes that we need not only be aware of, but also be focused on, so that we can find a better way forward for ourselves, our enterprises, and society.

Here are the top six paradoxes (of nine) of our time:

1. Intelligence—“brains are replacing brawn…knowledge and know-how is the new source of wealth, [yet] it is impossible to give people intelligence by decree, to redistribute it. It is not even possible to leave it to your children when you die…It is not possible to take this new form of intelligence away from anyone. Intelligence is sticky…nor is it possible to own someone else’s intelligence…It is hard to prevent the brains walking out the door if they want to…intelligence is a leaky form of property. [Finally,] intelligence tends to go where intelligence is. Well educated people give their families good education.”
2. Work—“some have work and money, but too little time, while others have all he time, but no work and no money…we also use money as the measure of efficiency. Our organizations, therefore want the most work for the least money while individuals typically want the most money for the least work.”
3. Productivity—“productivity means ever more and ever better work from ever fewer people…as more and more people get pushed out or leave organizations…[they] do for themselves, what they used to pay others to do for them.” In a sense the newly unemployed stifle market demand and further growth.
4. Time—“we never seem to have enough time, yet there has never been so much time available to us. We live longer and we use less time to make and do things as we get more efficient…[yet] we have created an insidious cycle of work and spend, as people increasing look to consumption to give satisfaction and even meaning to their lives.”
5. Riches—“economic growth depends, ultimately, on more and more people wanting more and more and more things…If , however, we look only at the rich societies, we see them producing fewer babies every year and living longer. Fewer babies mean fewer customers, eventually, while living longer lives mean, usually poorer and more choosy customers.”
6. Organizations—“more than ever, they need to be global and local at the same time, to be small in some ways but big in others, to be centralized some of the time and decentralized most of it. They expect their workers to be more autonomous and more of a team, their managers to be more delegating and more controlling…they have to be planned yet flexible, be differentiated and integrated at the same time, be mass-marketers while catering for many niches, they must introduce new technology, but allow workers to be masters of their own destiny; they must find ways to get variety and quality and fashion, and all at low-cost.”

Can we as enterprise architects ever resolve these paradoxes?

While, we cannot resolve the polarities of society, we can find ways to balance them, move between the extremes “intelligently,” as appropriate for the situation, and search for better way to adapt. We do this not only to survive, but to help our organizations and society thrive in spite of the paradoxes. “Life will never be easy, nor perfectible, nor completely predictable. It will be best understood backwards [20-20 hindsight], but we have to live it forwards. To make it livable, at all levels, we have to learn to use paradoxes, to balance the contradictions and the inconsistencies and to use them as an invitation to find a better way.”

So as architects what specifically can we do?

As architects, we are advisors to the Chief Information Officer (from a technology-business alignment perspective), Chief Financial Officer (from an IT investment perspective), and to the Chief Procurement Officer and Line of Business Program Managers (from an IT execution standpoint) and other organizational decision-makers. In this advisory role, we can help point out the polarities and paradoxes that may be driving the organization one way or the other, or actually in a conflicting, bi-directional manner. As advisors, we can highlight gaps, redundancies, inefficiencies, and opportunities and suggest ways to improve or capitalize on this. But most importantly of all, by having a structured way of thinking about IT planning and governance, we can provide a perspective to the organization that may otherwise be neglected or trashed (in favor of operations), and we can provide clarity to the organization in terms of planning and governance processes, when the organization may otherwise just be blowing around in the wind of universal contention.

"There are kings [executives] and there are prophets [architects]...the kings have the power and the prophets have the principles...but every king needs his prophet, to help him, and increasingly her, keep a clear head amidst all the confusions...prophets in spite of their name, do not foretell the future. No one can do that...What prophets can do is tell the truth as they see it."

Master of Paradox and the Enterprise Architect

Systems Theory, Community Model, and Enterprise Architecture

The Community Model is a way of presenting a high level view of function and the actors and their relationships in an organization. The model is then decomposed into activities, data, and requirements for establishing enterprise architecture. (adapted from Booz Allen Hamilton).

In the community model, the circle (representing the enterprise) is divided in half. The top half represents the mission functions. The bottom half represent the support functions. The Support functions act on the behalf of the mission function above and hence are connected by arrow from the support to the mission. The mission semi-circle above has arrows towards customers on the outside above the circle. The support semi-circle below has arrow towards supplies on the outside beneath the circle. There are additional arrows from the sides of the circle toward partners and towards organizational sub-entities that function independently (and have their own circle with mission and support), but that interfaces with the primary organization. I believe there should also be arrows connecting the prime circle to stakeholders, such as unions, associations, distributors, oversight authorities, even competitors.

This is a pretty cool way to get a high-level snapshot of the organization and the “community” it functions in.

In my view, the community model is an adaptation from Systems theory, which studies the nature of complex systems in society, nature, and science. In systems theory, organizations are compared to organisms; they are open and interact with their environment and must achieve effective relationships with the various actors in the environment to survive and thrive.

Systems theory is used as a framework to analyze and/or describe a group of objects that work in concert to produce some result. In this context, a system means a configuration of parts connected and joined together by a web of relationships. In the case of an EA community model, the enterprise and its affiliates are working to provide products and/or services to its users. The various actors in the system interact in a network of relationships to provide execute, support, consume, supply, distribute, partner, oversee, or compete. Every actor in the system has a role and every actor is impacting the others.

In User-centric EA, system theory and community model are terrific ways to understand and describe the enterprise, its functions, actors, interactions, and dependencies. It is also a good starting point for decomposing business, data, and system models to further understand the specific nature of the relationships and how these can be reengineered or improved prospectively.

Systems Theory, Community Model, and Enterprise Architecture

Where does EA belong in the enterprise?

Typically, EA is a program situated under the Chief Information Officer (CIO) i.e. in the Information Technology department. However, to maximize its effect on the end-user, EA should be elevated to a strategic mission-business functional area of the organization, for example under the Chief of Staff or similar such prominent function.

EA should be elevated in the organization because generally, it will have more impact for the benefit of the end-users, which is what user-centric EA is all about. It will have more impact because:

• It will be easier to capture and analyze information in the organization, because EA has a broader mandate and vantage point from which to conduct its activities.
• It will have the ears of executive management and therefore be in a better position to implement its recommendations and plans.
• It will be better able to synthesize business and IT information, because it will be functionally independent and will not be seen as biased or simply an extension of the CIO.
• It will be able to focus on identifying the information requirements from the business side of the house and to drive technology solutions from the IT side.
• Business will drive technology (rather than investing in new technologies for their own sake i.e. because they are new and “cool”), and therefore IT investments will align with business outcomes and improved organizational performance.

What do you think ─ should EA be part of the “IT shop” or should it be somewhere else in the organization?

Where does EA belong in the enterprise?