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.