Do Enterprise Architects need to engage with Corporate Politics?
The simple answer is ‘yes’, with a reminder that ‘engaging with’ is very different from ‘engaging in’ corporate politics. The reason is that politics are an unavoidable fact of corporate life, and whenever enterprise architects deal with the structure of a business, they cannot afford to ignore the political aspects.
Corporate politics often have a pejorative connotation, linked in a negative way to senior executives’ personal agendas. Although this can be true, one of our clients has provided a more positive definition of corporate politics, which is the playing out of the power and influence of an organisation’s leaders within an often ambiguous context, and how these dynamics lead to decisions that can be implemented.
What is meant by “within an often ambiguous context”?
The key phrase in the above definition is “within an often ambiguous context”. This encapsulates the dilemma of dealing with any strategy-driven business change. Some business executives like ambiguity, as it gives them plenty of wiggle-room if things don’t work out exactly as planned. A more responsible top manager will value the clarity that a well-architected future business model offers. By articulating the outcome of a planned strategic change in terms of the future organisation and its supporting processes and systems, such a model can provide a common, politically neutral basis for debating and then communicating the implications of the change with all interested parties.
This measure alone will not deal with situations where influential managers resist change if they believe their personal interests are threatened. In a recent blog we discussed the importance of having strong governance mechanisms supported by top-level business and IT executives to deal with such challenges. However, with sufficient foresight CIOs and their supporting enterprise architects can sometimes read the politics, and then head off, or at least mitigate, resistance to change. The following case study illustrates the importance of handling the political issues carefully.
Case Study
We once worked with a European insurance company, the structure of which had been predominantly country based. To cut costs and make better use of resources, the executive board decided to strip common business support functions out of the firm’s individual country organisations and concentrate them within a more limited set of regional administrative centres. The business logic behind this plan was impeccable.
The basic ideas behind this major structural change and its supporting business case had been floated for many months in various lengthy position papers. However, the country managers only appreciated the full nature of the change, when the firm’s enterprise architects produced a future-state business architecture that clearly laid out the redistribution of responsibilities. This picture, a high-level business capability model presented to them by the CIO, left them in no doubt as to what they were going to lose. What gave the model credibility was the fact that each box in the diagram was backed up by detail that had been previously agreed with senior functional managers.
Some country managers welcomed the move, as it would enable them to spend more time on customer-facing activities. Others, however, who we suspected were much more comfortable working as administrators, were very unhappy. They believed this change would diminish their roles. These disgruntled managers then focused their anger on the CIO, rather than on the senior business executives who had sponsored the change. Because the CIO needed help from the country managers for the implementation of the systems supporting the new business model, he then had to spend a great deal of time working with them individually to reassure them that their interests were being taken into account.
Outcome
This could have been avoided if an outline target-state business architecture had been produced much earlier in the process and then presented to the country managers by one of the sponsoring top executives. In short, reading the politics and responding appropriately would have avoided a lot of unnecessary hassle.
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