The Enterprise Architect’s Dilemma
Enterprise architects have always faced a dilemma. They often have difficulty finding enough time to fully understand the fundamental structure of their business, because they are too busy trying to fix elements of its enterprise architecture in a piece-meal way. In effect, they are continually fighting fires without being able to focus on reducing the risks of fire in the first place.
The problem is that if you don’t know what structure you have already have in place, and where your business is heading, then you can’t make optimal decisions. Day-to-day pressures often force architects to deprioritise activities that would make their work much easier in the longer term. In short, the demands of maintaining and fixing current problems tend to keep the architects in a reactive mode, perpetuating the very issues they need time to address and hindering their ability to make strategic improvements.
This dilemma becomes more common at times of political and economic uncertainty, which certainly applies to today’s market conditions. Businesses focused on survival will be looking for quick fix projects that promise short term cost reduction and operational efficiencies. Yet these are the very initiatives that can easily add to the complexity of the current state, thus building up trouble in the future.
Contributory Factors
There are a number of factors contributing to this paradox, including:
Lack of Stakeholder Understanding
The business stakeholders may buy into enterprise architecture as a concept but not see the importance of investing time in strategic design. Day to day pressures may mean that they want current problems to be addressed, which means strategic thinking remains on the back burner.
Pressure to Deliver
Tied to the above, the enterprise architects are often under pressure to demonstrate value quickly, so they are not given the time to build out the information that would ultimately save the business money/reduce risk/improve efficiency. Instead, they end up supporting the delivery of current projects, but their work is based on a disjointed or incomplete view as to where the organisation is headed. At worst, they may be seen as blockers, trying to enforce standards that are impeding progress. When companies face cost-cutting pressures, short-term thinking inevitably dominates. Ironically, dedicating time to examine the organisation as a whole can reveal opportunities for rationalisation and cost reduction, while also identifying the related business risks—a further aspect of the paradox.
The Enterprise Architects
In many cases the architects themselves are the problem. It’s easier to get dragged into fixing today’s problems and showing how you have helped than it is to spend time on strategic design where the tangible benefits may not be seen for months or even years. The ivory tower experiences of the past, where nothing got delivered except lots of elegant (but often out of date) diagrams, have made many architects cautious about overly focusing on the strategic aspects, but they often overcompensate by concentrating purely on support for project delivery. The challenge is of course to get the balance right.
So, what is the right approach?
There is no exact answer, but the most obvious thing is that enterprise architects do need to set aside some time for working out what the organisation currently has in place, where it is going strategically, and what it needs to support its strategy.
Successful architects balance their work on immediate needs with support for their organisation’s strategic requirements. They gain credibility through short-term change support activities alongside communication and demonstration of how they are also supporting their organisation’s strategic aims.
Enterprise architecture initiatives should therefore be based on understanding the business strategy and documenting just enough of the architecture to model the key dependencies that impact that strategy. This is required both for communication purposes (often anchored on a high-level business capability model) and to support decision making and implementation. The architects should then present overlays of planned changes so that everyone understands architecturally how the changes will support the strategy. Back to the fire analogy: with this approach the architects have a high-level map of the building, they can highlight where the fire risks are, and they can present plans to address those risks.
Enterprise architects who are too busy to spend time understanding the strategic direction against which they can manage their organisation’s architecture will often face the question a few years on as to why not much has changed. With current sentiment appearing to be that enterprise architecture is having yet another disillusionment phase, driven by a mix of economic uncertainties and a lack of value delivery, maybe it’s time for a refocus.
Useful Links
How Enterprise Architecture relates to Business Strategy
Why Enterprise Architects need to get to grips with Business Strategy