Enterprise Initiatives

One of the many hats that those of us who are responsible for IT strategy and Enterprise Architecture wear is the evangelist hat. My IT organization has many exciting strategies and initiatives in action today such as....

1. SOA/BPM implementation
2. Creating an official Open Source strategy
3. Leveraging Web 2.0 technologies to improve communication
4. Moving towards agile development
5. Implementing portfolio management

Being in a leadership and architect role, I have to luxury of researching newer technologies (although I do most of it in my "free" time at night). I am not tied to production support which would distract me from my responsibility of "Driving innovation for tomorrow". Many of the people within IT who will be contributors to the above initiatives and recipients of the benefits have a full plate day in and day out and do not have the luxury of having the depth of knowledge on these topics. As a matter of fact, many are far out of touch with what these technologies are and what benefits they can bring to the organization.

Today we had a day long strategy session to go over our OGSM (Objectives, Goals, Strategies, and Measures) for 2008. Our strategies are broken up into four areas and I own the one called "Architecture and Technology". When we got to my section I started talking about Web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis and received many chuckles when I recommended that we embrace these technologies. When discussing Open Source strategies I needed to emphasize that this is more the Windows vs. Linux. This is about taking a cost effective approach to providing IT and the business with tools and products to enable people to get their jobs done effectively. Instant messaging is another topic that came up. There is still caution and concern about the downside of enterprise instant messaging. I call it the fear of the unknown which is similar to most IT shops first impression of unleashing the internet to their employees.

What became obvious to me today is that for these initiatives to have any chance to succeed, the architecture and technology strategy team is going to first have to spend some time educating the masses on what these technologies are, what the business benefits are, and what the impact will be to our day to day jobs. We must become evangelists, thought leaders, and teachers. For most of the folks in IT, they need us to break down all of the terminology and research into a practical, "Reader's Digest" version that they can consume and understand without interfering with the mounds of work that they are responsible for delivering. One great way of communicating this is through a blog from the architecture and technology team. We will also have to hold various presentations to sell these ideas in both directions. All of these initiatives require a change in behavior which makes educating and communicating the most critical success factors for delivering success.

I spent the last two days in Weston, FL. attending various BPM and SOA related lectures. One session I enjoyed was George Paras's "Connecting the Dots: Establishing THE Enterprise Perspective". George is the editor-in-chief for the Architecture and Governance Magazine.

George reminded us that as architects we should think, act, and behave as business people. Everything we do as architects should be geared around value creation by affecting change in the name of product innovation, process transformation, technology transformation, and business transformation. In other words, we need to enable the business to be better, faster, more efficient, better informed, etc.

He then went on to point out that one of the reasons that it is so hard to create business value these days is because our technology and our business processes have become so complex. He showed us one slide that states, "Complexity INHIBITS Change....Complexity consequently INHIBITS Business Value". In my opinion, as we begin to model both our operational and technical architectures, we must make it a goal to minimize the complexity and subscribe to the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!) methodology.

The last golden nugget that I took away from George's presentation was about maintaining balance. George talked about how companies struggle to make progress towards establishing an enterprise architecture because the business demands so many tactical projects yielding only short term gains. The chief architect or architecture group must figure out how to get the company to start thinking strategically which yields long term gains. But be careful, you need to strike a balance between tactical and strategic. The business cannot stop while you go off for 6-12 months to create an enterprise architecture.

George's answer to the "Balancing Act" is the Managed Portfolio. The Managed Portfolio combines :

• Enterprise Strategy & Planning
• Project Portfolio Management
• Enterprise Architecture

The leaders of these three groups need to be in sync and must have shared goals geared around value creation.

During a break, I had a chance to speak to George (us Greeks need to stick together). I discussed my project and our approach to implement SOA only for the services required to support our BPM initiative, as opposed to creating a full blown SOA implementation. He agreed that we were on the right path which will make me sleep a little better tonight. I then handed him my last business card which was crumpled and stained with spaghetti sauce. Talk about great first impressions!

There were many other meaningful lectures at the show, but this was the best one to blog about.