No Power for Enterprise Architects

Some time ago I have written about The Enterprise Architecture Matrix, where I used a small sequence from the movie Matrix to explain my line of thinking for Enterprise Architecture. This time I use the scene from Lord Of The Ring where Frodo is looking into Galadriels mirror to see the future.But see yourself:



Frodo is the Solution Architect, who is trying to solve a problem at hand and Galadriel is the Enterprise Architect(EA) who provides the Solution Architect (SA) with tools (the mirror) and advice.
 
The Enterprise sleeps, and when the Enterprise Architect explains, only the Solution Architect listens.

EA : "Will you look into the mirror?"
SA : "What will I see?"
EA : "Not even the wisest can say, for the mirror shows many things. Things that are, things that were, and some things that have not yet come to pass."

SA looks into the mirror, and sees Legolas, Merry and Pippin, then Sam. The Shire as it was, then the Shire ravaged, overrun with orcs, and Sam in chains.



Then the Eye appears, and the Task grows heavier, trying to pull itself down into the mirror. SA snatches it away, falls backward onto the ground.

EA : "I know what it is you have seen, for it is also in my mind. It is what will come to pass if you should fail. The Fellowship is breaking. Already it has begun. He will try to take the ring. You know of whom I speak. One by one, it will destroy them all."

SA : 'If you ask it of me, I will give you the One Task.'



EA : "You offer it to me freely. I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired this."
A dark light comes over her as she touches the power of the Task.
EA : "Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!"




EA backs away from the Task, ut for a moment, she looks old, and it seems to bring her no joy to have done the right thing.
EA : "I passed the test. I will diminish, and go into the west, and remain Galadriel."




SA : "I cannot do this alone."




EA : "You are a Ringbearer, Frodo. To bear a architecture task is to be alone. This task was appointed to you, and if you do not find a way, no one will."




Frodo : "Then, I know what I must do. It's just I am afraid to do it."
Galadriel : "Even the smallest person can change the course of the future."

I try to allow all ideas to influence my thinking about Enterprise Architecture. Sometimes it works perfect, sometimes not at all, but I truly hope that I try. I personally believe that an Enterprise Architect should stay away from the power and if he decides to take the power stay away from Enterprise Architecture. There is a high risk that an Enterprise Architect with power abuses that to build just another empire no-one needs. Instead of building this empire focus on repair GLUE Diseases and fix the flows in the GLUE Circulatory System.

 

Feedback as always more than welcome.

Power, Process, Project, People - Force One

In my last post I have started a series about Power, Process, Project and People. In this post I like to reflect a bit on power and what I am doing with respect to power in my daily Enterprise Architecture life. Just to repeat the definition from the Oxford Dictionaries: Power is the ability or official capacity to exercise control; authority. There is of course a lot of other definitions or deeper explanations of this concept. As a starter I recommend to read the Manifesto reference-sheet from power and response-ability from Tom Graves. For simplicity reasons I here stick to the very simple above mentioned Oxford Dictionaries definition.

Power is most obviously found in organizations by just looking at the organizational chart. In most cases it is formed like a pyramid with one on the top and some below, which have each some below them again. This can potentially be a very high structure (e.g. CEO > CxO Board > Divisions > Departments > Groups > Employees), even though there is some companies who run a flat hierarchy. In most cases these structures are self defending (GLUE Division Defence). It is very uncommon to see an Employee who has a higher salary than his manager. Also concepts like a technical career path typically only worsen the situation, because now the employees themselves are organized in a pyramid. And it can all be summed up by the concept of Julius Caesar: Divide and Conquer, which I have used to introduce the concept of the GLUE Domains. What I observe most it that it is limiting and framing people into something way smaller than they could be.

The typical advice I hear and read in various Enterprise Architecture Frameworks (e.g. TOGAF 9) is to place Enterprise Architecture in the governance structure close to the CxO level, preferable reporting direct to the CIO (Enterprise IT Architecture) or to the CEO (Enterprise Architecture). There is also the idea to put it below the CMO (?Enterprise Marketing Architecture?). Even though I have seen a lot of value created at that level I also see a fair amount of disconnect to the employee level and Ivory tower behaviour. The balance between strategy, tactics and operational work is not always easy to keep. And if an Enterprise Architect works only in his power structure then the result will be biased towards exactly that structure, heavily influenced and by that imbalanced due to only staying inside the frames given by it.

So what am I doing different? I am actually using the GLUE Domains in the GLUE Space to identify and map the power structures. The amount of GLUE Decks very  much depends on the context. For the blog I use four to explain the concept, but it can easily go way higher (or lower).

Typically these Domains are in conflict with each other with respect to Roles and Responsibilities. For example the responsibility of an Application Owner in the processes of Application Lifecycle Management who owns every aspect of his Application:

And Test Execution, which is typically owned by Test Management. Here two Empires are potentially in conflict.

The (theoretically) simple answer for Enterprise Architecture is now to work close to the decision makers (in this case most likely the CIO) and guide the CIO to take the right decisions. The basic (and I think wrong) assumption behind that is, that the CIO decides and forces it in. Following the basic idea of the power then this is indeed the case and especially and heavy command & control liking environments there is a high likelihood that  this will indeed be forced in, because the managers on those structures want to know everything what their people know. I personally believe that this is in most cases causing more damage than it is repairing, therefore I do work different. (Seth Godin touches this problem in his post destabilizing the bullying power structure.

I do not need only a strong connection to the decision makers, but I do need to be connected also to the lower levels of the organization. Therefore no framework and no formal governance is enabling me to be an enterprise architect, but knowing that I am one helps a lot! So instead of relying on pure power structures I go to the people who have the conflict and challenges at hand, and then I am doing Enterprise Architecture work by helping them to connect to the holistic Enterprise (repairing GLUE Diseases), no matter how deep or high they are on the ladder of power. That of course requires that I have to earn trust first, which is most easily achieved by walking the talking, especially when the advice is beyond the scope of the power structure.

Feedback as always more than welcome.

Power, Process, Project, People

I keep writing about People, because I strongly believe that in the end the only thing which really matters is people, like in the Agile Manifesto: Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools.

In the past days I have seen plenty of interesting posts putting various concepts in the focus. One caught my attention and is very much worth to read:

RT @davidsprott: The shape of the next generation EA framework. t.co/dolaKQtb #CIO #ecosystem #services #entarch
— Tom Graves (@tetradian) 18. Februar 2013

This post followed some back and forth twittering and it was a very enjoyable discussion. It triggered some thinking I wanted to reflect already for a while, because every now and then I see an interesting tendency to market something as the one and only way on how to look at the world or solutions, be it IT or non IT.

Coming back to people I want to reflect on three forces especially which I observe every day and what I do to work with them or what I see in the typical Enterprise Architecture approaches. The three forces are (for each one definition from Oxford Dictionaries):

• Power - The ability or official capacity to exercise control; authority.
• Project - An individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.
• Process - A systematic series of mechanized or chemical operations that are performed in order to produce something. 

The definition of process and project is sometimes confusing if compared, so for simplification I typically differentiate by using project in the context of unique deliveries and process if the deliveries are repeatable. These three forces have a different effect on people, and each and every person has a different opinion what type of force he prefers, but in typical organizations all three forces exist in co-existence and influence each other. The key to all these three powers in the end is the People though and interesting enough they get quite often forgotten.

This is only the first post in a series, otherwise it is getting too long. The next post will be about power. If you have any input to give straight away then I am happy to read or hear from you.

Enterprise Life Forms

In my last post "Details vs Context" I have touched the challenge to find the right balance between getting lost in the details and getting lost in the context. The frequent readers of my blog should by now know that my personal take on Enterprise Architecture is very much focusing on people without blending out the building blocks of the flow:

An interesting and relevant observation of mine is now that each and every company has its very own soul, the true essence of that company. Of course on the surface they all (at least the big ones) seem to have the same functions, same processes, same good practices applied, but if you just manage to see one level deeper it all of a sudden is total different between the companies and has its very own beauty. The soul of a company has some aspects which seem to be generic patterns:

• It is deeply rooted in the old guard people (GLUE Defence).
• New people sooner or later tend to adopt to it.
• It is embedded in the structural, process, project and especially in the informal organization.
• It can not be easily changed.
• It has self healing effects which protect the system against damages inflicted by external sources or careless management / leadership attempts and forces the whole environment back into the pre-change attempt.

One of the first things when I work in or with a company for  me is to try to identify the soul of it. Because it seems to be unique and very special. I have not seen two different companies with an identical soul and that is actually something which I personally find very interesting and relevant to create fit-to-purpose architectures, not to mention that the soul of the company has its very own unique beauty which is as far as I see it worth to be protected.

Details vs Context

In my last post I was writing about walking the talking, which is based on my experience one of the key elements for success. Some time ago I have written about the need to remember the larger context which is also reflected in my WISE SCAN post (E stands for Environment). So it is essential to connect a solution in the context to secure sustainable success and not rely on random luck. The saying: "To not see the wood for the trees" is also based on that line of thinking.

The interesting challenge now is to not get lost in the greater context and by that forgetting to chop the trees. I have seen many Enterprise Architects loosing contact to reality and connecting literally everything to a problem or solution at hand but totally forgot to deliver the solution. The intellectual discussion with them was actually truly great and I learned a lot (this happened many many times), but pity enough it wasn't very relevant.
I believe it carries the very same danger to not deliver than getting lost in the details, but does contain an additional problem. Those who get lost in the context loose credit due to not delivering, while those who get lost in the details are typically valued for their great knowledge, but questioned about their communication skills.

So my advice (and I try to live up to that every day) is: deliver while connecting, connect while delivering. Don't think something fully through, but connect it good enough. Fail often and fail fast. And secure that the whole environment is setup to support that. If not, then fix the information flow, fix the GLUE Circulatory Flow, so that information flows free, is easy accessible, enriched fast and supports collision of ideas.

And in most cases the answer lies in the people who are operating in the GLUE Circulatory System. They are the elements which needs to be worked on to secure information flow. Technology can be a catalyzer or facilitator but is typically not the key element to secure optimal information flow. Balancing details and context is an ongoing challenging task which mainly operates on people and their ability to connect details with context. Various Enterprise Architecture tools help here a lot, but what is most successful is finding the right words for the right people to connect the details and the context via an emotional holistic story touching all senses. Tough one, but there is moments of perfect flow in life. And those moments are the reason why I deeply love my job.

Walk the Talk

My last posts have been very much focused and following a red line, so now I am trying to pick up some loose ends. There is one thing which bugs me quite often when I am doing Enterprise Architecture work. There is way to much focus on talking about Enterprise Architecture. Something which is also reflected by following twitter post:

I suspect that the primary job role of Enterprise Architects is to argue with other EAs about what #entarch is. Prove me wrong, people.
— Kevin Brennan (@bakevin) 7. Februar 2013

My personal observation is that Architects actually discuss about Enterprise Architecture, but do in most cases not argue. This is a differentiation I find very important, because an argumentation chain would at least provide a red line why one approach is chosen over the other. By looking at the pure amount of frameworks and tools in the market and the amount of new players entering that space it is quite obvious that Enterprise Architecture is at the moment in a hype or fever situation. This can easily lead to total irrational decisions. On this topic I recommend to take a closer look at the Tulip Mania, some of the behaviours might also be seen in more recent crises.

Here (as mentioned before) I use GLUE as mapping tool for me. The real most interesting (and relevant) question for me always is: Where is a person stuck in the GLUE circulatory system.

And then I try to go into that position, placing myself onto the seat of that particular person to understand where the missing links are. If I manage to understand a portion of it I try to show the traces by using whatever terminology is approbiate for that particular person. Not GLUE, not a specific framework, but whatever language element helps. Sometimes indirect communication by others is the only way to succeed, sometimes I need to play over time. Invest today, harvest in a couple of month when a small trigger has grown into something powerful.

In most cases showing the connections to other information streams (in the circulatory system) allows the person at hand to see some possible answers to concrete problems which have not been solveable before. And there is one thing I know, then it is that I do not know anything, but what I know is that I am an Enterprise Architect. So in most cases I have literally no chance to give a correct concrete answer even though I am fairly often asked to give one, but I am able to help the information flow, to unblock the thinking, to link elements. There is my focus and that enables others to bring their great knowledge to the game and solve problems I would not have dreamt of being solved.

drEAmtime - summary

This is my final post in a long series of posts where I used the great post from Ivo Velitchkov as a red line to explain my thinking. Following posts did I create so far:

1. drEAmtime - Communication
2. drEAmtime - Bridging the Silo
3. drEAmtime - Capability Cemetery
4. drEAmtime - EPIC SCAN
5. drEAmtime - Archetypes
6. drEAmtime - WISE SCAN
7. drEAmtime - PACE SCAN 
8. drEAmtime - Frameworks
9. drEAmtime - modelling

So it is time to summarize the whole series and once again I like to use a quote from Ivo: 

In summary, more often than not, when contemporary mainstream EA is trying to introduce a common language, it creates confusion and additional work to deal with it. When trying to bridge the silos, it creates new silos instead. When trying reduce the IT spending, it in fact makes no change or increases them. When trying to deal with complexity,  it’s just pathetic

I completely share Ivos line of thinking here. The first observation ("When contemporary mainstream EA is trying to introduce a common language, it creates confusion and additional work to deal with it") is actually the main reason that started my work on GLUE. I was facing a situation where multiple software supplier and various integrators including a fairly diversified internal IT process structure had to deliver towards 4 releases every year without sharing any common knowledge and understanding, but all of them tried to teach introduce their approaches. So, I have to confess, in my first line of thinking, GLUE was just another stupid approach to create a common language to try to bring them all on the same page.

After working some weeks on the concepts I proudly presented it and was astonished that my brightness (GLUE) was not obvious to everyone. What I faced (and most of the feedback I collected over several years afterwards) was (of course) full misunderstanding. Everyone was all in for the idea of aligning to language to a single common one, as long as it is the one already used to protect the own way of thinking (tribe). So I totally failed and out of frustration I parked GLUE for a couple of years. Looking back the main problem was that I was so full of being right that I did not listen to those I wanted to follow my line of thinking.

Since then I have my changed my focus and live more up to the concept of being a ChickenBrain. I changed the focus from GLUE being the ultimate truth which everyone has to obey towards a pure mapping tool to identify GLUE diseases. Whatever approach or framework in an engineering context I face I immediately map it into GLUE to double check my understanding of the framework at hand (and to ask sense making questions if needed).

Ivos second observation ("When trying to bridge the silos, it creates new silos instead.") is also something I observed more than once, most inside corporations where the Head of Enterprise Architecture tried to create or defend his very own Empire. That empire (or tribe) thinking is of course typically creating or defending an Enterprise Architecture silo. It can easily go worse if the Architecture Domains are split into several teams which have to argue their existence and easily spend more time on defending their existence than in providing real value. And it typically it does not matter how they are split, as long as they are split roles and responsibilities will be defined and some sort of open or hidden fighting is typically the result.

Ivos third observation ("When trying reduce the IT spending, it in fact makes no change or increases them.") and fourth observation ("When trying to deal with complexity,  it’s just pathetic.") are connected and has typically many root causes. For example information flow problems or how I name them a GLUE disease, lack of analyzing the To-Be Architecture where the WISE SCAN of the GLUE Division Destination helps and quite often just bad implementations, where the PACE SCAN of the GLUE Division Discovery helps. The various root causes of unneeded complexity can be analyzed with the help of the EPIC SCAN.

I like to thank Ivo for his great inspirational post and I am happy that I finished to follow that red line. Comments and feedback is as always more than welcome (and new inspirational posts as well).