Enterprise Architecture's First Order Problem -- Shared Understanding of Strategy
There is no shortage of business thinkers and authors who will tell us this statement is true:
Anyone can create a good strategy. The most frequent failure is in execution.
Unfortunately, this underestimates the difficulty in creating a "good strategy." While the statement above is absolutely true, it is not unusual to find companies that don't have a formal strategy at all, or who fail to share their divisional strategies with all of their employees (a key measurement of strategy adoption in a company is "how many of your employees can recite your company strategy").
One of the obstacles I've come to recognize in Enterprise Architecture is unique to companies that either don't have a formal strategy or who do not share their strategy with their staff -- you cannot align efforts to strategy if there is no consistent understanding of strategy across divisions.
I always knew this was true. I've become more and more convinced that it is a hard-and-fast rule. In other words, if you want to be successful as an EA in a company that doesn't share strategy, this becomes your First Order Problem -- how to develop a consistent strategy that everyone at the senior level agrees with and that they are willing to share with their staff.
That's it in a nutshell. To be successful, your organization must develop a consistent strategy that everyone at the senior level agrees with and that they are willing to share with their staff.
First order problem -- In other words, focus on this. Make progress on this. Measure yourself by your progress on this. Associate yourself with the people who "should" own this, and align yourself with the people who actually do own this (rarely the same person). Find ways to be involved. Find ways to contribute. Volunteer. Make things happen. Find ways to support incremental progress, while recognizing that the increment may not be good enough in the long run. For EA to become known for "doing successful Enterprise Architecture," a clear and communicated company strategy is ground zero.
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Article first published as "The human element to strategy" on the Vanguard EA blog at http://vanguardea.com/the-human-element-to-strategy/
David W. - you are absolutely right that how many enterprise architects that can really take a company's or a business unit's business strategy and create an enabling enterprise architecture plan/roadmap across business, data, application, technology, and security domains - feeding into a PMO process for execution. I still see folks with EA titles navigating to solution, application, or technology architecture - their comfort zone.
I am of the mind that EA's bigger problem is a company hat actually "does" EA. Many have teams that have this title yet fail to be more than solution architects or at worst technical leads; they lack the credibility even if a strategy is produced (as implied by the article). Why isn't a strategy followed? Why doesn't it exist? I think a company should first look at the EA role first, then strategy second.
My thoughts on this for a while have been that the outputs of strategy are not truly consumable by the rest of the organization. The reality is that strategy acts as a decision framework that enables and constrains decisions and thus behaviors throughout the organization. Operational governance is really about having those engaged in operation execution make the same decisions the strategists would if they were in those roles. What is needed is a way to express this decision framework such that it is the output of strategy and the primary input to architecture. I
EA is the bridge between strategy and execution. If you want to build a bridge, you need something to anchor to on both sides. So I agree completely.
Sorry Nick Malik but I strongly disagree. Not with your good intentions nor with your assertion in your nutshell closing statement but with the fact that you put strategies front & centre. You state that the first order problem is solved by your last paragraph, when in fact, the problem lies 2 levels above the strategic level, namely : 1) Not understanding what the business objectives are; and 2) Either Ignoring the knowledge every manager brings to the organisation that supports the business objectives or possibly confusing knowledge and data. Strategies and tactics are both solved by having an explicit knowledge model which has nothing to do with what a lot of data experts call the 'conceptual data model'. This from a 45+ year veteran in the business, data, information and technology domains.