Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Transformation: Related But Distinct Concepts That Can Change the World

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on the respective roles of enterprise architecture and enterprise transformation and the danger --and opportunity -- of conflating the two.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with The Open Group Conference held in San Francisco the week of January 30, 2012.

We've assembled a panel from among the conference speakers and contributors to examine the fascinating relationship between enterprise architecture (EA) and enterprise transformation. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

For some, the role and impact of an information technology and the organizing benefits of enterprise architecture make them larger than life, when it comes to enterprise transformation. In other words, if you really want enterprise transformation, you really need enterprise architecture to succeed in the modern enterprise.

For others, the elevation of enterprise architecture as a tag team to enterprise transformation improperly conflates the role of enterprise architecture and, as such, waters down enterprise architecture and risks obscuring its unique contribution.

So how should we view these roles and functions? How high into the enterprise transformation firmament should enterprise architecture rise? And will rising too high, in effect, melt its wings and cause it to crash back to earth and perhaps become irrelevant?

Or is enterprise transformation nowadays significantly dependent upon enterprise architecture, and therefore, we should make enterprise architecture a critical aspect for any business moving forward?

We'll pose these and other questions to our panel here to deeply examine the relationship between enterprise architecture and enterprise transformation. So with that, let me now introduce our guests.

We're here with Len Fehskens, Vice President of Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group. Welcome, Len.

Len Fehskens: Hi, Dana. Great to be here.

Gardner: We're also here with Madhav Naidu, Lead Enterprise Architect at Ciena Corp. Welcome to the show, Madhav.

Madhav Naidu: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Bill Rouse, Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the College of Computing, as well as Executive Director of the Tennenbaum Institute, all at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He's also the Principal at Rouse Associates. Welcome to our show, Bill.

Bill Rouse: It's great to be here, Dana. Thank you.

Gardner: And Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research, join us. Welcome back, Jeanne.

Jeanne Ross: Good morning, Dana.

Architecture and transformation

Gardner: Let's start with you Len. You’ve been tracking enterprise architecture for quite some time. You’ve been a practitioner of this. You’ve been involved with The Open Group for some time. Why is enterprise transformation not significantly dependent upon enterprise architecture, and why would it be a disservice to bring enterprise architecture into the same category?

Fehskens: I don't think that's quite what I believe. My biggest concern is the identification of enterprise architecture with enterprise transformation.

First of all, these two disciplines have different names, and there's a reason for that. Architecture is a means to transformation, but it is not the same as transformation. Architecture enables transformation, but by itself is not enough to effect successful transformation. There are a whole bunch of other things that you have to do.

My second concern is that right now, the discipline of enterprise architecture is sort of undergoing -- I wouldn’t call it an identity crisis -- but certainly, it's the case that we still really haven't come to a widespread, universally shared understanding of what enterprise architecture really means.

Just go onto any Internet discussion group about enterprise architecture, open up the discussion about the definition of enterprise architecture, and I guarantee that you will get hundreds and hundreds of posts all arguing about what enterprise architecture is. To make that problem worse by trying to fold enterprise transformation into the function of enterprise architecture is just not a good idea at this point.

To make that problem worse by trying to fold enterprise transformation into the function of enterprise architecture is just not a good idea at this point.

My position is that they're two separate disciplines. Enterprise architecture is a valuable contributor to enterprise transformation, but the fact of the matter is that people have been transforming enterprises reasonably successfully for a long time without using enterprise architecture. So it's not necessary, but it certainly helps. It's just like having power tools makes it easier to build a house, but people have been building houses for a long time without power tools.

I'm concerned about making bigger promises than we can actually keep by falling into the trap of believing that enterprise architecture, by itself, is sufficient to make enterprise transformation successful. I don’t think that’s the case. There are other things that you need to be able to do besides developing architectures in order to successfully transform an enterprise.

Gardner: Okay, Len, if the concept, the notion, or the definition of enterprise architect is changing, I suppose we also have to recognize that enterprise transformation, as it's defined, is changing as well. To borrow from your analogy, the power tools to build a house are not necessary, but you might be able to build a better house a lot faster. And building things better and faster seem to be much more a part of enterprise transformation now than they used to be.

Fehskens: No argument, but again, to use that analogy, you can do more with power tools than build just houses. You can build all kinds of other stuff as well. So, no argument at all that enterprise architecture is not a powerful means to effecting enterprise transformation, but they are distinct disciplines. The means to an end doesn’t mean the means is the end and doesn’t make them synonymous. They are still, as I said, distinct.

Gardner: I think we’re getting close to understanding the relationship. Madhav, as a practitioner of enterprise architecture at Ciena Corp., are you finding that your role, the value that you’re bringing to your company as an enterprise architect, is transformative? Do you agree with Len? Do you think that there's really a confluence between these different disciplines at this time?

Means and ends

Naidu: Definitely. What Len mentioned, it rhymes very well with me. The means and the end, kind of blending it down. Transformation itself is more like a wedding and EA is more like a wedding planner. I know we have seen many weddings without a wedding planner, but it makes it easier if you have a wedding planner, because they have gone through certain steps (as part of their experience). They walk us through those processes, those methods, and those approaches. It makes it easier.

That’s why, definitely, I agree with what Len said. Enterprise transformation is different. It's a huge task and it is the actual end. Enterprise architecture is a profession that can help lead the transformation successfully.

One another point Len brought up in this discussion is that, it is not just the enterprise architects who will be doing the whole thing. Almost everybody in the enterprise is engaged in one way or another. The enterprise architect plays more like a facilitator role. They are bringing the folks together, aligning them with the transformation, the vision of it, and then driving the transformation and building the capabilities. Those are the roles I will look at EA handling, but definitely, these two are two different aspects.

Gardner: Is there something about the state of affairs right now that makes enterprise architecture specifically important or particularly important for enterprise transformation? I believe I'm getting more towards this idea that IT is more important and that the complexity of the relationship between IT and business necessitates EA and therefore transformation really can't happen without it.

There is a lot of discussion about what really constitutes an EA and where are the boundaries for EA.

Naidu: We know many organizations that have successfully transformed without really calling a function EA and without really using help from a team called EA. But indirectly they are using the same processes, methods, and best practices. They may not be calling those things out, but they are using the best practices. When they do that, the transformations have been successful, but then when they don’t apply those best practices and standards, there are many organizations that fail.

That’s why, now, like Len brought up earlier, there is a lot of discussion about what really constitutes an EA and where are the boundaries for EA, because it is part IT, there are different roles, and part business, and a lot of people are engaged.

So there's a lot of churn going on over what should be the part of EA. But going back to your question, I definitely see the critical role EA is playing. Hopefully, in the next few years, EA will form its appropriate objectives, processes, and methods so that we can say this is what we mean by EA.

Gardner: Bill Rouse, how do you come down on this? Clearly there's an impact that EA has on enterprise transformation. We seem to grasp for analogies when we try to define this relationship. Are you finding in your research and through the organizations you're working with that the role of architecture creeps in? Even if people don’t know they’re doing architecture, when they get to transformation and a complex setting in today’s world, architecture is almost a necessity.

Rouse: There are two distinctions I’d like to draw. First of all, in the many transformation experiences we've studied, you can simplistically say there are three key issues: people, organizations, and technology, and the technology is the easy part. The people and organizations are the hard part.

The other thing is I think you’re talking about is the enterprise IT architecture. If I draw an enterprise architecture, I actually map out organizations and relationships among organizations and work and how it gets done by people and view that as the architecture of the enterprise.

Important enabler

Sometimes, we think of an enterprise quite broadly, like the architecture of the healthcare enterprise is not synonymous with IT. In fact, if you were to magically overnight have a wonderful IT architecture throughout our healthcare system in United States, it would be quite helpful but we would still have a problem with our system because the incentives aren’t right. The whole incentive system is messed up.

So I do think that the enterprise IT architecture, as I see it -- and others can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that's what you’re talking about -- is an important enabler, a crucial enabler, to many aspects of enterprise transformation. But I don’t see them as close at all in terms of thinking of them as synonymous.

Gardner: Len Fehskens, are we actually talking about IT architecture or enterprise architecture and what's the key difference?

Fehskens: Well, again that’s this part of the problem, and there's a big debate going on within the enterprise architecture community whether enterprise architecture is really about IT, in which case it probably ought to be called enterprise IT architecture or whether it’s about the enterprise as a whole.

For example, when you look at the commitment of resources to the IT function in most organizations, depending on how you count, whether you count by headcount or dollars invested or whatever, the numbers typically run about 5-10 percent. So there's 90 percent of most organizations that is not about IT, and in the true enterprise transformation, that other 90 percent has to transform itself as well.

There's a big debate going on within the enterprise architecture community whether enterprise architecture is really about IT.

So part of it is just glib naming of the discipline. Certainly, what most people mean when they say enterprise architecture and what is actually practiced under the rubric of enterprise architecture is mostly about IT. That is, the implementation of the architecture, the effects of the architecture occurs primarily in the IT domain.

Gardner: But, Len, don't TOGAF at The Open Group and ArchiMate really step far beyond IT? Isn’t that sort of the trend?

Fehskens: It certainly is a trend, but I think we've still got a long way to go. Just look at the language that’s used in the architecture development method (ADM) for TOGAF, for example, and the model of an enterprise architecture. There's business, information, application, and technology.

Well, three of those concepts are very much related to IT and only one of them is really about business. And mostly, the business part is about that part of the business that IT can provide support for. Yes, we do know organizations that are using TOGAF to do architecture outside of the IT realm, but the way it's described, the way it was originally intended, is largely focused on IT.

The TOGAF standard was developed almost entirely by the IT community. But it is clear to people who step back far enough from the details of where the implementation happens that architectural thinking is a very generally applicable discipline and certainly can be applied to that other 90 percent of the enterprise that I talked about.

Not a lot going on

It's just that there's not a whole lot of that going on, and as Madhav pointed out, what is going on is generally not called architecture. It's called organizational design or management or it goes under a whole bunch of other stuff. And it's not referred to as enterprise architecture, but there is a lot of that stuff happening. As I said earlier, it is essential to making enterprise transformation successful.

My personal opinion is that virtually all forms of design involve doing some architectural thinking. Whether you call it that or not, architecture is a particular aspect of the design process, and people do it without recognizing it, and therefore are probably not doing it explicitly.

But Bill made a really important observation, which is that it can't be solely about IT. There's lots of other stuff in the enterprise that needs to transform.

Gardner: To that point, let's go to Jeanne Ross. Jeanne, in your presentation at The Open Group Conference, you mentioned data management and that the ability of leveraging analytics and presenting that to more people with good data in real time is an essential ingredient for transformation and for just doing things better, faster, cheaper, more impactful in the market, and so on.

Now wouldn’t the data management as a category sort of crossover. It's got parts of IT, parts of architectures, and parts of organizational management. When we think about making data management essential, doesn’t this in a sense bring about more recognition that an architectural approach that helps foster something at that level at that category becomes really important in today’s world?

Ross: I actually would discourage people from focusing on data management first. We've had a number of companies we studied who thought, "All I care about is the data. I'm just going to get that cleaned up." What they learned was that if they didn’t clean up their processes, they didn’t need to be thinking about data. It was going nowhere.

Analytics has been over-hyped as something that we can do a lot of in IT, while we're waiting for the rest of the organization to get its act together around architecture. Similarly, that has led to a lot of IT efforts that haven’t added real value to organizations.

So I wouldn't emphasize data management as a priority, even though we'll get there eventually. It is actually essential at some point. I think a lot of efforts around data management have been around the idea "Data makes this organization run. Let's get data fixed," as if we could just do that in isolation from everything else. That is a really frustrating approach.

I'd go back to the challenge we have here of enterprise architecture being buried in the IT unit. Enterprise architecture is an enterprise effort, initiative, and impact. Because enterprise architecture is so often buried in IT, IT people are trying to do things and accomplish things that cannot be done within IT.

We've got to continue to push that enterprise architecture is about designing the way this company will do it business, and that it's far beyond the scope of IT alone. I take it back to the transformation discussion. What we find is that when a company really understands enterprise architecture and embraces it, it will go through a transformation, because it's not used to thinking that way and it's not used to acting that way.

Disciplined processes

If management says we're going to start using IT strategically, we're going to start designing ourselves so that we have disciplined business processes and that we use data well. The company is embracing enterprise architecture and that will lead to a transformation.

Data management will be a crucial element of this, but the big mistake I see out there is thinking that IT will fix up data, and that is going to have some big impact on either enterprise architecture or enterprise transformation, or both. The ‘I’ is simply a critical element. It's not something that we can just fix.

Gardner: You also said that someday CIOs are going to report to the enterprise architects, and that’s the way it ought to be. Does that get closer to this notion that IT can't do this alone, that a different level of thinking across disciplines and functions needs to occur?

Ross: I certainly think so. Look at companies that have really embraced and gotten benefits from enterprise architecture like Procter & Gamble, Tetra Pak, and Maersk. At P&G’s, IT is reporting to the CIO but he is also the President of Shared Services. At Maersk and Tetra Pak, it's the Head of Global Business Processes.

Once we get CIOs either in charge with more of a business role and they are in charge of process, and of the technology, or are reporting to a COO or head of business process, head of business transformation, or head of shared services, then we know what it is we’re architecting, and the whole organization is designed so that architecture is a critical element.

But in practice, what we’re seeing is more CIOs reporting to someone who is, in fact, in charge of designing the architecture of the organization.

I don’t think that title-wise, this is ever going to happen. I don’t think we’re ever going to see a CIO report to chief enterprise architect. But in practice, what we’re seeing is more CIOs reporting to someone who is, in fact, in charge of designing the architecture of the organization. By that, I mean business processes and its use of data. When we get there, first of all, we will transform to get to that point and secondly, we’ll really start seeing some benefits and real strategic impact of enterprise architecture.

Gardner: Madhav, at Ciena, do you see that this process-level capability around enterprise architecture is what's occurring, even if the titles are not aligned that way or the org chart doesn’t point to the CIO reporting to an architect. Is architecture in practice elevating a process orientation to this capability set that therefore fosters better transformation?

Naidu: Definitely. Some progress has been happening, especially what Jeanne was mentioning about the business process changes itself, rather than just bringing the systems and customizing it to our needs, and rather than transforming our business processes so that they match industry standard.

That’s definitely happening, and the architecture team has engaged and is influencing that process. But that said, the maturity level takes quite a few years, not only at Ciena, but in other places too. It will take some time but this is happening.

Gardner: Len Fehskens, we have a mentality in our organizations that architecture isn't that important, and there's some cynicism and skepticism around architecture, and yet, what we’re hearing is it's not in name only. It is important, and it's increasingly important, even at higher and higher abstractions in the organization.

How to evangelize?

How then do you evangelize or propel architectural thinking into companies? You may have been concerned that advancement of architectural thinking would have been impelled when we conflate enterprise architecture into transformation, but until then, what should you do? How do you get the thinking around an architectural approach more deeply engrained in these companies?

Fehskens: Dana, I think that’s the $64,000 question. The fundamental way to get architectural thinking accepted is to demonstrate value. I mean to show that it really brings something to the party. That’s part of my concern about the conflation of enterprise transformation with enterprise architecture and making even bigger promises that probably can't be kept.

The reason that in organizations who’ve tried enterprise architecture and decided that it didn’t taste good, it was because the effort didn’t actually deliver any value. Certainly the advice that I hear over and over again, and that I myself give over and over again, is: “Don’t try to boil the ocean.” Start small and demonstrate success. And again, there's that old saw that nothing succeeds like success.

The way to get architectural thinking integrated into an organization is to use it in places where it can deliver obvious, readily apparent value in the short-term and then grow out from that nucleus. Trying to bite off more than you can chew only results in you choking. That's the big problem we’ve had historically. There are all these clichés and the reason of clichés is because there's certain amount of truth to them about your reach exceeding your grasp, for example.

It’s about making promises that you can actually keep. Once you've done that, and done that consistently and repeatedly, then people will say that there's really something to this. There's some reason why these guys are actually delivering on a big promise.

Trying to bite off more than you can chew only results in you choking. That's the big problem we’ve had historically.

Rouse: Can I offer something, another perspective?

Fehskens: Yeah, please do go.

Rouse: We ran a study recently about what competencies you need to transform an organization based on a series of successful case studies and we did a survey with hundreds of top executives in the industry.

The number one and two things you need are the top leader has to have a vision of where you’re going and they have to be committed to making that happen. Without those two things, it seldom happens at all. From that perspective, I'd argue that the CIO probably already does report to the chief architect. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs architected Microsoft and Apple. Carnegie and Rockefeller architected the steel and oil industries.

If you look at the business histories of people with these very successful companies, often they had a really keen architectural sense of what the pieces were and how they needed to fit together. So if we’re going to really be in the transformation business with TOGAF and stuff, we need to be talking to the CEO, not the CIO.

Gardner: Jeanne Ross, let’s focus on what Bill just said in terms of the architecture function really being at the core and therefore at the highest level of the organization.

Corporate strategy

Ross: I totally agree. The industries and companies that you cited, Bill, instinctively did what every company is going to need to do in the digital economy, which is think about corporate strategy not just in terms of what products do we offer, what markets are we in, what companies do we acquire, and what things do we sell up.

At the highest level, we have to get our arms around it. Success is dependent on understanding how we are fundamentally going to operate. A lot of CEOs have deferred that responsibility to others and when that mandate is not clear, it gets very murky.

What does happen in a lot of companies, because CEOs have a lot of things to pay attention to, is that once they have stated the very high-level vision, they absolutely can put a head of business process or a head of shared services or a COO type in charge of providing the clarification, providing the day-to-day oversight, establishing the relationships in the organizations so everybody really understands how this vision is going to work. I totally agree that this goes nowhere if the CEO isn’t at least responsible for a very high-level vision.

Gardner: So if what I think I'm hearing is correct, how you do things is just as important as what you do. Because we’re in such a dynamic environment, when it comes to supply chains and communications and the way in which technology influences more and more aspects of business, it needs to be architected, rather than be left to a fiat or a linear or older organizational functioning.

So Bill Rouse, the COO, the chief operating officer, wouldn’t this person be perhaps more aligned with enterprise architecture in the way that we’re discussing?

We can't find a single instance of a major enterprise transformation in a major company happening successfully without total commitment of top leadership.

Rouse: Jeanne makes a good point. Let's start with the basic data. We can't find a single instance of a major enterprise transformation in a major company happening successfully without total commitment of top leadership. Organizations just don’t spontaneously transform on their own.

A lot of the ideas and a lot of the insights can come from elsewhere in the organization, but, given that the CEO is totally committed to making this happen, certainly the COO can play a crucial role in how it's then pursued, and the COO of course will be keenly aware of a whole notion of processes and the need to understand processes.

One of the companies I work very closely with tried to merge three companies by putting in ERP. After $300 million, they walked away from the investment, because they realized they had no idea of what the processes were. So the COO is a critical function here.

Just to go back to original point, you want total commitment by the CEO. You can't just launch the visionary message and walk away. At the same time, you need people who are actually dealing with the business processes to do a lot of the work.

Gardner: Madhav, at the Ciena, how do you view the relationship between what you do as a lead enterprise architect and what your operations officer does? It might not be that title, but the function of operations management and oversight. How do they come together?

Not role, but involvement

Naidu: Not by role, but by involvement. There are quite a few business executives engaged in the business process identification and changes. Many of them report to the top executives in the business line. That’s what the current setting right now. We're pretty happy that that kind of support is coming from many of the executives and business teams. That said, there is no formal relationship in terms of reporting and all.

Gardner: Len Fehskens, you mentioned a while ago that finding success and demonstrating value are instrumental to promulgating the use of architecture and understanding the benefits of architecture. Would operations, rather than just technology, be a target than for how you can demonstrate that? The architecture processes might be the sweet spot in some of the thinking now about where to demonstrate that enterprise architecture is the way to go.

Fehskens: Absolutely. And this ties into another thing we need to be aware of, which is that the need to transform, the motivation for enterprise transformation, doesn’t always come from disruptive technologies. There was a really interesting talk last week at the conference on sustainable enterprise architecture, and they made the point that there are lots of major disruptions that have nothing to do with technology.

In particular, in a world where resources are becoming increasingly scarce, and impact on the environment is a significant concern, the drive to transform an enterprise will often come from other places than the appearance of disruptive technologies. There will be disruptions of all sorts that have to be dealt with. The transformation in response to those isn't going to come out of the IT organization. It's going to have to come from other organizations.

The idea that we talked about at the beginning of the discussion was that architecture is a very powerful means for figuring out what kind of transformation is necessary, and how to effect it, means that we need architectures that aren’t about IT, we need to understand driving architectural approach to the other considerations that an enterprise deals with.

Architecture is a very powerful means for figuring out what kind of transformation is necessary, and how to effect it.

As Bill said, historically it's been the case that the lead architects in the most successful organizations were the guys who had the vision and the guys who were at the very top of the organizational structure who created this organization in the very first place. And they weren’t IT guys. Bill Gates, in particular, didn’t build Microsoft around its IT capability. He built it around a whole bunch of other ideas that were really business ideas, not IT concepts. So, yeah, absolutely.

Gardner: I'm afraid we'll have to wrap it up. I’d like to go once around the panel with a pretty direct question and if you could perhaps provide your succinct thoughts. What is the relationship between enterprise architecture and enterprise transformation? Let's start with you first, Jeanne.

Ross: I'd say the relationship between enterprise architecture and enterprise transformation is two-way. If an organization feels the need for a transformation -- in other words, if it feels it needs to do something -- it will absolutely need enterprise architecture as one of the tools for accomplishing that.

It will provide the clarity the organization needs in a time of mass change. People need to know where they're headed, and that is true in how they do their processes, how they design their data, and then how they implement IT.

It works just as well in reverse. If a company hasn't had a clear vision of how they want to operate, then they might introduce architecture to provide some of that discipline and clarity and it will inevitably lead to a transformation. When you go from just doing what every individual thought was best or every business unit thought was best to an enterprise vision of how a company will operate, you're imposing a transformation. So I think we are going to see these two hand-in-hand.

What's the relationship?

Gardner: Bill Rouse, same question, what in your view is the relationship between enterprise architecture and enterprise transformation?

Rouse: I think enterprise transformation often involves a significant fundamental change of the enterprise architecture, broadly defined, which can then be enabled by the enterprise IT architecture.

Gardner: Madhav, also to you the same question, relationship between EA and enterprise transformation?

Naidu: Like I mentioned in the beginning, one is end, another one is means. I look at the enterprise transformation as an end and enterprise architecture providing the kind of means. In one way it's like reaching the destination using some kind of transportation mechanism. That’s how I look at the difference between EA and ET?

Gardner: Len, I know you’ve gone out at some length about this, but perhaps the elevator version. How do you view the relationship between EA and enterprise transformation?

Enterprise transformation often involves a significant fundamental change of the enterprise architecture, broadly defined, which can then be enabled by the enterprise IT architecture.

Fehskens: One of the fundamental principles of architecture is taking advantage of reuse when it's appropriate. So I'm just going to reuse what everybody just said. I can't say it better. Enterprise architecture is a powerful tool for effecting enterprise transformation. Jeanne is right. It's a symmetric or bidirectional back-and-forth kind of relationship, and what Bill and Madhav said applies as well. So I really don't have anything to add.

Gardner: Well, I found it very interesting. I have a newfound appreciation for architecting how you do something better enables you to decide what it is that you're going to do in the future, and there is an interesting relationship between how and what that perhaps escape some folks. I hope they recognize that a little bit more deeply.

You’ve been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with The Open Group Conference in San Francisco, the week of January 30th, 2012. We've enjoyed our discussion with our guests and I’d like to thank them and call them out individually one more time.

Len Fehskens, the Vice President of Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group. Thank you, Len.

Fehskens: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Madhav Naidu, Lead Enterprise Architect at Ciena Corporation. Thanks so much.

Naidu: It's been my pleasure.

Gardner: Bill Rouse, Professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering as well as the College of Computing and also Executive Director at The Tennenbaum Institute, all at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Principal at Rouse Associates. Thank you, Bill.

Rouse: Thank you. I enjoyed it.

Gardner: And Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Thanks so much for your input.

Ross: Thank you. Great talking with you all.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks to our audience for joining us, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on the respective roles of enterprise architecture and enterprise transformation and the danger --and opportunity -- of conflating the two. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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MIT's Ross on How Enterprise Architecture and IT More Than Ever Lead to Business Transformation

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast in conjunction with The Open Group Conference in San Francisco on how enterprise architecture can lead to greater efficiency and agility.

Register for The Open Group Conference
Jan. 30 - Feb. 3 in San Francisco.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview series coming to you in conjunction with The Open Group Conference this month in San Francisco. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and I will be your host throughout these discussions.

The conference will focus on how IT and enterprise architecture support enterprise transformation. Speakers in conference events will also explore the latest in service oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing, and security.

Today, we're here with one of the main speakers at the conference, Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Jeanne studies how firms develop competitive advantage through the implementation and reuse of digitized platforms.

She is also the co-author of three books: IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results, Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, and IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain.

As a lead-in to her Open Group presentation on how adoption of enterprise architecture (EA) leads to greater efficiencies and better business agility, Jeanne and I will now explore how enterprise architects have helped lead the way to successful business transformations.

Please join me now in welcoming Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Welcome back to BriefingsDirect, Jeanne. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Jeanne Ross: Thank you, Dana. Nice to be here.

Gardner: Your upcoming presentation will describe how enterprise architecture has contributed to success for such companies as Campbell Soup and Southwest Airlines, but before we go into that, it has been typically difficult to concretely link things like IT productivity and general business success. I wonder, then, how you measure or determine that enterprise architects and their practices are intrinsic to successful business transformations? How do we link the two?

Ross: That’s a great question. Today, there remains kind of a leap of faith in recognizing that companies that are well-architected will, in fact, perform better, partly because you can be well-architected and perform badly. Or if we look at companies that are very young and have no competitors, they can be very poorly architected and achieve quite remarkably in the marketplace.

But what we can ascribe to architecture is that when companies have competition, then they can establish any kind of performance target they want, whether it’s faster revenue growth or better profitability, and then architect themselves so they can achieve their goals. Then, we can monitor that.

We do have evidence in repeated case studies of companies that set goals, defined an architecture, started to build the capabilities associated with that architecture, and did indeed improve their performance. We have wonderful case study results that should be very reaffirming. I accept that they are not conclusive.

Architectural maturity

We also have statistical support in some of the work we've done that shows that high performers in our sample of 102 companies, in fact, had greater architecture maturity. They had deployed a number of practices associated with good architecture.

So we do have evidence. It’s just that if you really don’t want to believe it, you could poke holes in it. There still is a certain amount of faith attached to the link between performance and architecture.

Gardner: I certainly get your point that repeatability would be a chief indicator, that if you intend to do something repeatedly, you can point to the ways in which you would carry that out. How about the intent from the perspective of wanting to transform in a certain way that you haven’t done before? Is there something that being an architect allows that’s different from the past? Is there something that’s new about this, rather than just trying to reengineer something?

Ross: Yes, the thing we're learning about enterprise architecture is that there's a cultural shift that takes place in an organization, when it commits to doing business in a new way, and that cultural shift starts with abandoning a culture of heroes and accepting a culture of discipline.

Nobody wants to get rid of the heroes in their company. Heroes are people who see a problem and solve it. But we do want to get past heroes sub-optimizing. What companies traditionally did before they started thinking about what architecture would mean, is they relied on individuals to do what seemed best and that clearly can sub-optimize in an environment that increasingly is global and requires things like a single face to the customer.

Nobody wants to get rid of the heroes in their company. Heroes are people who see a problem and solve it.

What we're trying to do is adopt a culture of discipline, where there are certain things that people throughout an enterprise understand are the way things need to be done, so that we actually can operate as an enterprise, not as individuals all trying to do the best thing based on our own experience.

The fundamental difference of being an architected firm is that there is some underlying discipline. I'll caution you that what tends to happen is great architects really embrace the discipline. They love the discipline. They understand the discipline, and there is a reluctance to accept that that’s not the only thing we need in our organization. There are times when ad hoc behaviors enable us to be much more innovative and much more responsive and they are exactly what we need to be doing.

So there is a cultural shift that is critical to understanding what it is to be architected. That’s the difference between a successful firm that’s successful because it hasn’t gotten into a world of really tough competition or restrictions on spending and things like that and an organization that is trying to compete in a global economy.

Gardner: It’s interesting to me that we're focusing not so much on the individual, the enterprise architect, but more the office of the enterprise architect.

Ross: Right. Would you like me to speak to an architect instead? Would that help?

Cultural phenomenon

Gardner: No, the point is that the champion that is important is not just an individual. It’s that putting into place a repeatable office of the enterprise architect that is a cultural phenomenon, rather than a charismatic one.

Ross: Yes.

Gardner: What then is the role of the architect, if this isn’t just about a champion, but really about change that’s repeatable and that’s culturally inculcated? What, then, is the role and what should they do?

Ross: The architect plays a really critical role in representing the need for this discipline, for some standards in the organization, and for understanding the importance of shared definitions for data. The architect should be able to create a very constructive tension in the organization, and that’s the tension between individuality, innovativeness, local responsiveness, and the need for enterprise thinking, standardization, and discipline.

Normally, in most companies, the architect’s role will be the enforcer of discipline, standardization and enterprise thinking. The tension will be created by all kinds of people who are saying, "Wait, I'm different. I need this. My customer insists on that." When the tension is working effectively, you get just enough architecture.

One thing we've learned over the years, as we've studied architecture, is that’s actually what we want. We don’t want to be a tightly architected organization, because tomorrow we're going to wake up and the world is going to change, and we have to be ready for that. We want to be architected enough to be efficient, to be able to reuse those things we need to reuse, to be agile, but we don’t want to start embracing architecture for architecture’s sake or discipline for discipline’s sake.

We don’t want to be a tightly architected organization, because tomorrow we're going to wake up and the world is going to change, and we have to be ready for that.

We really just need architecture to pull out unnecessary cost and to enable desirable reusability. And the architect is typically going to be the person representing that enterprise view and helping everyone understand the benefits of understanding that enterprise view, so that everybody who can easily or more easily see the local view is constantly working with architects to balance those two requirements.

Gardner: Let’s take a contextual view here. It’s 2012 already and there's a lot happening in IT with disruption in the form of cloud computing trends, an emphasis on mobile computing, big data, and the ability to harness analytics in new and interesting ways, all sort of churning together. We're also still faced with a difficult environment, when it comes to the economy. Is this a particularly good time, from your vantage point, to undertake enterprise architecture, or is this perhaps not the best time?

Ross: It’s a great time for most companies. There will be exceptions that I'll talk about in a minute. One thing we learned early on in the research is that companies who were best at adopting architecture and implementing it effectively had cost pressures. What happens when you have cost pressures is that you're forced to make tough decisions.

If you have all the money in the world, you're not forced to make tough decisions. Architecture is all about making tough decisions, understanding your tradeoffs, and recognizing that you're going to get some things that you want and you are going to sacrifice others.

If you don't see that, if you just say, "We're going to solve that by spending more money," it becomes nearly impossible to become architected. This is why investment banks are invariably very badly architected, and most people in investment banks are very aware of that. It’s just very hard to do anything other than say, "If that’s important to us, let’s spend more money and let’s get it." One thing you can't get by spending more money is discipline, and architecture is very tightly related to discipline.

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Tough decisions

In a tough economy, when competition is increasingly global and marketplaces are shifting, this ability to make tough decisions is going to be essential. Opportunities to save costs are going to be really valued, and architecture invariably helps companies save money. The ability to reuse, and thus rapidly seize the next related business opportunity, is also going to be highly valued.

The thing you have to be careful of is that if you see your markets disappearing, if your product is outdated, or your whole industry is being redefined, as we have seen in things like media, you have to be ready to innovate. Architecture can restrict your innovative gene, by saying, "Wait, wait, wait. We want to slow down. We want to do things on our platform." That can be very dangerous, if you are really facing disruptive technology or market changes.

So you always have to have that eye out there that says, "When is what we built that’s stable actually constraining us too much? When is it preventing important innovation?" For a lot of architects, that’s going to be tough, because you start to love the architecture, the standards, and the discipline. You love what you've created, but if it isn’t right for the market you're facing, you have to be ready to let it go and go seize the next opportunity.

Gardner: Perhaps this environment is the best of all worlds, because we have that discipline on the costs which forces hard decisions, as you say. We also have a lot of these innovative IT trends that would almost force you to look at doing things differently. I'm thinking again of cloud, mobile, the big data issues, and even social-media types of effects. So is that the case from your perspective?

Ross: Absolutely. We should all look at it that way and say, "What a wonderful world we live in." One of the companies that I find quite remarkable in their ability to, on the one hand, embrace discipline and architecture, and on the other hand, constantly innovate, is USAA. I'm sure I'll talk about them a little bit at the conference.

This is a company that just totally understands the importance of discipline around customer service. They're off the charts in their customer satisfaction.

This is a company that just totally understands the importance of discipline around customer service. They're off the charts in their customer satisfaction.

They're a financial services institution. Most financial services institutions just drool over USAA’s customer satisfaction ratings, but they've done this by combining this idea of discipline around the customer. We have a single customer file. We have an enterprise view of that customer. We constantly standardize those practices and processes that will ensure that we understand the customer and we deliver the products and services they need. They have enormous discipline around these things.

Simultaneously, they have people working constantly around innovation. They were the first company to see the need for this deposit with your iPhone. Take a picture of your check and it’s automatically deposited into your account. They were nearly a year ahead of the next company that came up with that service.

The way they see it is that for any new technology that comes out, our customer will want to use it. We've got to be there the day after the technology comes out. They obviously haven't been able to achieve that, but that’s their goal. If they can make deals with R&D companies that are coming up with new technologies, they're going to make them, so that they can be ready with their product when the thing actually becomes commercial.

So it's certainly possible for a company to be both innovative and responsive to what’s going on in the technology world and disciplined and cost effective around customer service, order-to-cash, and those other underlying critical requirements in your organization. But it's not easy, and that's why USAA is quite remarkable. They've pulled it off and they are a lesson for many other companies.

Gardner: And as you pointed out, being able to repeat this is really essential. So that gets back to that discipline. But you've mentioned that you've got ongoing research, and you've mentioned a company, USAA that you're working with and you're familiar with. I suppose this gives us a chance then to step back and take a look at what the MIT Center for Information Systems Research is and does and your role there.

Value from IT

Ross: The Center for Information Systems Research is part of the Sloan School of Management. We were formed in 1974 to study how companies get value from information technology.

In 1974, we were studying mainframes and IT directors. There was no such thing as a CIO yet, but we have certainly gone through the stages of the increasing importance of IT in organizations. We went through the end-user computing. We went through enterprise resource planning (ERP) and e-business. We've followed, and hopefully led, thinking around how IT adds value in organizations.

You mentioned this is a good time to be introducing architecture. This is a good time to be at the Center for Information Systems Research, because IT is so central now to business success, and many companies that didn't start as digital companies are really struggling to understand what it means to transform for the digital economy, and that's exactly what we study.

Gardner: You've mentioned one company, USAA. Let’s take a look at a number of companies. I know you're going to be mentioning several during your presentation. Are there any salient lessons that are common among them? Are they all different and therefore you can't draw such common denominators, or are there a couple that jump out?

Ross: Well, our established research on this, and this is the work that appeared in the Enterprise Architecture as Strategy book. We find that the things we learned as we prepared that book are still very true. Companies indeed go through stages, and they're very predictable -- we've not yet seen an exception to this -- and they're hard.

You have to respond to the marketplace. You have to do whatever it takes.

Stage one is the stage of, don't worry about the discipline, just have fun, learn how to use IT, apply it to any strategic need where it makes sense, and go out there and do your thing, but eventually all of that will lead to a fairly messy legacy environment.

We saw, when we studied these stages, that as companies understood these stages, they would avoid stage one, but it turns out that, if you are a fast growing innovative company, you can't avoid that stage. You actually don't know how you're going to make money. You have to respond to the marketplace. You have to do whatever it takes. Then, as you get really good at things, you start to establish yourself in what is often now a new industry.

You've created an industry. That's how you succeeded. But because you're making money, you're going to attract competitors. When you get to the stage that you actually have competitors, then you look at what you created and you say, "Oh no, we really have to clean up some of this legacy." That’s really what stage two is about. It's the underlying technology.

Now, we're learning how to not make quite as big a mess, but there is still this stage of, "Okay, let's refrain from kind of the crazy innovation and be more disciplined about what we put in and how we reuse" and all that kind of thing.

In the third stage, we get much more emphasis on building platforms that wire in those core processes that enable us to do high-volume transactions. These are things around order-to-cash, human resources (HR), or finance. There will be some of that in the earlier stages, but we really worry about scale in this third stage, scaling up so that we can manage large volume transactions.

We think this third stage is going to look different in a world of software as a service (SaaS) and cloud, because in the past, third stage often meant you put in Oracle, SAP, or something like that. Nowadays, it's much more about piecing together some cloud services. It does look different. It goes in faster, but it's still pretty tricky. If you're not architected well, you can really create a mess in stage three.

Working smarter

Stage four is really about working smarter on this platform, learning how to innovate off the platform. And companies are struggling to get there, because once you get in this platform, it takes a while to really make it solid and learn how to use it well. We've been studying that for some time, and companies get there.

This is the story of Campbell Soups and the Southwest Airlines. They're trying to use the platforms they've created, even though the process of putting them in takes a very long time. So you're still putting them in, while you are trying to learn to get good at using them. It's a challenging world out there.

Gardner: So I shouldn’t reach the conclusion that the enterprise architecture kicks in, in stage three and four. It should be something that would be there and useful throughout these stages.

Ross: That's correct. What happens is that in stage one you don't think a lot about architecture. If you don’t think at all, you are going to regret it. But you just can't predict what are going to be the critical capabilities in your organization. When you can't predict the critical capabilities in your organization, it limits how much you can architect.

You can bet on some things. There are some things around finance and HR that are pretty predictable even in stage one. But that early stage is where you're really defining yourself as a company, and that can last for some years, as you grow. As long as you're under $500 million in sales or at least, let's say, $200 million in sales, you've got some leverage there, because you can only create so big of a mess.

The Open Group is great for me, because there is so much serious thinking in The Open Group about what architecture is, how it adds value, and how we do it well.

If you start growing beyond that, you're going to need more architecture. That’s when you really get into stage two and start seriously defining your standards and the processes that enable you to get them in and recognize when you need exceptions and when they're out of date and that kind of thing.

Gardner: So even as we have had this evolution in these stages that happen within these enterprises, we have also had historical evolution in the definition, standardization, and certification around the architects themselves. Where are we there? Is there a stage three or four that we are at with the architects?

Ross: I think we'll be constantly tweaking the certification processes for architects. We get smarter about what they need to know and what they need to be good at, but I don’t know that I would so much call it stages for the architect certification as just getting smarter and smarter about what great architects will excel at. We have the basics in place. I haven't been involved a lot in certification programs, but I think there is a good sense of the basics that are required.

Gardner: We certainly seem to be well into a professionalization phase and we've got a number of different groups within The Open Group that are working on that across different disciplines. So I'm curious. Is The Open Group a good forum for your message and your research, and if so, why?

Ross: The Open Group is great for me, because there is so much serious thinking in The Open Group about what architecture is, how it adds value, and how we do it well. For me to touch base with people in The Open Group is really valuable, and for me to touch base to share my research and hear the push back, the debate, or the value add is perfect, because these are people who are living it every day.

Major themes

Gardner: Are there any other major themes that you'll be discussing at the conference coming up that you might want to share with us? Did we cover them all? What did we leave out?

Ross: Well, we're still doing the analysis on our latest survey. So I'm not exactly sure what the key findings will be that I'll be sharing. One thing we have observed in our cases that is more and more important to architects is that the companies are struggling more than we realized with using their platforms well.

I'm not sure that architects or people in IT always see this. You build something that’s phenomenally good and appropriate for the business and then you just assume, that if you give them a little training, they'll use it well.

That’s actually been a remarkable struggle for organizations. One of our research projects right now is called "Working Smarter on Your Digitized Platform." When we go out, we find there aren't very many companies that have come anywhere close to leveraging their platforms the way they might have imagined and certainly the way an architect would have imagined.

It's harder than we thought. It requires persistent coaching. It's not about training, but persistent coaching. It requires enormous clarity of what the organization is trying to do, and organizations change fast. Clarity is a lot harder to achieve than we think it ought to be.

We find there aren't very many companies that have come anywhere close to leveraging their platforms the way they might have imagined and certainly the way an architect would have imagined.

The message for architects would be: here you are trying to get really good at being a great architect. To add value to your organization, you actually have to understand one more thing: how effectively are people in your company adopting the capabilities and leveraging them effectively? At some point, the value add of the architecture is diminished by the fact that people don't get it. They don’t understand what they should be able to do.

We're going to see architects spending a little more time understanding what their leadership is capable of and what capabilities they'll be able to leverage in the organization, as opposed to which on a rational basis seem like a really good idea.

We've been studying companies, and the easiest ones to study are ones like 7-Eleven Japan and Protection One, which is a security company. These are companies that have replicated models. You look at one branch or one store and you say, "How are you doing this?" Then you say, "Okay, here is the best one. How are we going to make sure that everybody uses our technology and the information that's coming from it? How are we going to do that throughout the company?"

That’s even harder than designing and implementing an architecture. Architects are going to have to be well aware of that, because if companies are not driving value from what they have built, you may as well stop spending the money. That’s a tough thing for an architect to admit, because there’s so much you can do just on a rational basis to make the company look better. But if they are not using it, it's not worth anything.

Gardner: That might explain some of the attention that’s been given to things like cloud and mobile, because there is a sense of an organic adoption going on, and if the workers, the managers, the departments, specific functional groups like marketing, for example, are going to SaaS, cloud, mobile for "bring your own device," or consumerization of IT benefits, perhaps there's an opportunity to take advantage of that, learn from it, and then standardize it and implement as a platform. Is that somewhere close to what you are seeing?

Ross: Yes, absolutely.

Getting started

Gardner: Before we segue out, let's consider advice about getting started. When you're an organization and you've decided that you do want to be a level three or four maturity, that you want to transform and take advantage of unique opportunities for either technical disruption or market discipline, how do you go about getting more structure, more of an architecture?

Ross: That's idiosyncratic to some extent, because in your dream world, what happens is that the CEO announces, "This is what we are going to be five years from now. This is how we are going to operate and I expect everyone to get on board." The vision is clear and the commitment is clear. Then the architects can just say, and most architects are totally capable of this, "Oh, well then, here are the capabilities we need to build. Let’s just go build them and then we'll live happily ever after."

The problem is that’s rarely the way you get to start. Invariably, the CEO is looking at the need for some acquisitions, some new markets, and all kinds of pressures. The last thing you're getting is some clarity around the vision of an operating model that would define your critical architectural capabilities.

What ends up happening instead is architects recognize key business leaders who understand the need for, reused standardization, process discipline, whatever it is, and they're very pragmatic about it. They say, "What do you need here to develop an enterprise view of the customer, or what’s limiting your ability to move into the next market?"

And they have to pragmatically develop what the organization can use, as opposed to defining the organizational vision and then the big picture view of the enterprise architecture.

When they see real demand and real leadership around certain enterprise capabilities, they focus their attention on addressing those.

So in practice, it's a much more pragmatic process than what we would imagine when we, for example, write books on how to do enterprise architecture. The best architects are listening very hard to who is asking for what kind of capability. When they see real demand and real leadership around certain enterprise capabilities, they focus their attention on addressing those, in the context of what they realize will be a bigger picture over time.

They can already see the unfolding bigger picture, but there’s no management commitment yet. So they stick to the capabilities that they are confident the organization will use. That’s the way they get the momentum to build. That is more art than science and it really distinguishes the most successful architects.

Gardner: We'll be looking forward to learning more through your research and through the examples that you provide.

We've been talking with Jeanne Ross, the Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Jeanne and I have been exploring how enterprise architects have helped lead the way to successful business transformations as a lead-in to her upcoming Open Group presentation.

This special BriefingsDirect discussion comes to you in conjunction with The Open Group’s Conference, which is January 30 to February 3 in San Francisco. You'll hear more from Jeanne and many other global leaders on the ways that IT and enterprise architecture support enterprise transformation.

So thank you, Jeanne, for joining us in this fascinating discussion. I really had a good time.

Ross: Thanks so much, Dana, I enjoyed it.

Gardner: And I look forward to your presentation in San Francisco and I encourage our listeners and readers to attend the conference, if they're able. There’s more information available on our website and through this content.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator throughout this Thought Leader Interview Series. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast in conjunction with The Open Group Conference in San Francisco on how enterprise architecture can lead to greater efficiency and agility. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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The State of Enterprise Architecture: Vast Promise or Lost Opportunity?

Transcript of a sponsored podcast on the potential of enterprise architecture, resistance in the business community, and finding common ground.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion, coming to you from The Open Group Conference in Boston, the week of July 19, 2010.

We’ve assembled a panel to delve into the advancing role and powerful potential for enterprise architecture (EA). The need for EA seems to be more pressing than ever, yet efforts to professionalize EA do not necessarily lead to increased credibility and adoption, at least not yet.

We’ll examine the shift of IT from mysterious art to more engineered science and how enterprise architects face the unique opportunity to usher in the concept of business architecture and increased business agility.

The economy’s grip on budgets and the fast changing sourcing models like cloud computing are pointing to a reckoning for EA -- of now defining a vast new promise for IT business alignment improvement or, conversely, a potentially costly lost opportunity.

Please join me in better understanding the dynamic role of EA by welcoming our guests. We are here with Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research and noted author. Welcome to BriefingsDirect.

Jeanne Ross: Thank you. It’s nice to be here.

Gardner: We are also here with Dave Hornford, an architecture practice principal at Integritas Solutions, as well as the Chairman of The Open Group Architecture Forum. Welcome Dave.

Dave Hornford: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Gardner: We're also here with Len Fehskens, Vice President for Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group. Welcome, Len.

Len Fehskens: Hi, Dana. Glad to be here.

Gardner: Let me start with looking at this inflection point or opportunity. Many have discussed here at the conference that there's a lot to be done and gained by proper EA. But the stakes are high, because not all of these organizations seem to be rallying around this concept. So why are the stakes high, and why haven’t people gravitated to EA?

Ross: The stakes are high, because organizations are becoming more digital out of necessity. It’s a more digital economy. Thus, IT is more strategic. I think people see that, but outside of people who have already embraced architecture, there is some reluctance to think that the way we get more value from IT is basically by taming it, by establishing a vision and building to standards and understanding how that relates back to new ways of doing business, and actually developing standards around business processes and around data.

Exciting stuff

There is a piece of it that’s just not appealing. Besides, we feel like this should all be about innovation, which should be all exciting stuff. Architecture just doesn’t have the right feel for a lot of businesspeople, who are saying, "Oh sure, the digital economy is very exciting."

Gardner: We’ve also been hearing here at the conference that there is this delayed gratification effect, whereby a lot of the structure and discipline that you might bring to architecture can have a long-term and strategic benefit, but most people are focused on the here and the now.

A recurring theme for me here has been, "How we accommodate both?" How do we present something to our executives and across the organization that they can work with now, but that also will put us in a strong long-term position? Jeanne?

Ross: This is where there is a certain art in architecture. We’ve learned a lot about methodologies, disciplines, and tools, but there is an art to be able to take the long-term vision for an organization and not just say, "It’ll come guys, be patient," but rather, "I understand that starting tomorrow, we need to begin generating value from more disciplined processes."

Great organizations actually learn how to do something in the near-term that builds toward the long-term, but also delivers on some new value to the organization today.

Gardner: Len, we're looking at quite a bit of change. We're asking the organization to change how they use and perceive of IT, and to elevate the way in which they process the logic of the business itself to an architectural level. Then, we're also asking these architects, the individuals, to put on many hats and be multi-disciplined.

The question to you is, in examining the state of EA, this concept of a professional category or definition of EA, where is it at this time?

Fehskens: It’s really just a gleam in many people’s eye at this point. If you look at the discipline of EA and compare it to mature professions like law and medicine, we’re back 200-300 years ago. We’ve been doing a lot of research recently into the professionalization of other disciplines.

Most of the people studying the subject come up with a fairly short list of characteristics of professions. They usually include things like a well-defined body of knowledge, and well-defined educational program and particular degree programs, often offered by schools that are specifically focused on the discipline, not just the department within a larger organization.

There's some kind of professional certification or vetting process and often even some kind of legal sanction, a right to practice or right to bear the title. We don’t have any of those things right now for EA.

Proprietary knowledge

The body of knowledge is widely distributed and is largely proprietary. We’re at a state similar to going to a lawyer, and the lawyers try to sell themselves based on secret processes that only they had that would allow you to get a fair shake before a judge. Or similar thing with a doctor, who would say, "Come to this hospital, because we’re the only people who know how to do this particular kind of procedure."

So, we’ve got a long way to go. The big thing we’ve got going for us is that, as Jeanne pointed out, the stakes are high and so many organizations are becoming dependent upon the competent practice of EA as a discipline.

There's a lot of energy in the system to move forward very quickly on the professionalization of the discipline, and in addition to take advantage of what we’ve learned from watching the professionalization of disciplines like law, medicine, engineering, civil architecture, etc. We’ve got long ways to go, but we are running really hard to make some progress.

Gardner: Dave, we have high stakes. We have a great opportunity. This is a cake that hasn’t been baked yet, so folks can work with this. As a practitioner and someone who’s involved with the Forum, tell us where you see the current traction. Where are people who are doing this doing it well, and what is it about them that makes make prepared for this?

Hornford: Where people are doing it well is where they are focused on business value. The question of what is business value is highly dependent. People will mention a term, “agility.” I work with a mining company. They define agility as the ability to disassemble their business. They have a mine. Someone buys the mine. We need to remove the mine from the business. A different organization will define agility a different way, but underpinning all of that is what is the business trying to achieve? What is their vision and what is their goal?

Practitioners who are pursuing this have to be very clear on what is the end state, what is the goal, what is the business transformation, and how will the digital assets of the corporation the IT asset actually enable where they’re going, so that they’re able to move themselves to a target more effectively than their competition.

The stakes are high in the sense that should someone in your industry figure this out, they will change the game on you, and you will now be in a serious trouble. As long as all of your competition is struggling as long as you are, you’re okay. It’s when someone figures it out that they will change the game.

Gardner: Jeanne, through your research and publishing, you’ve identified some steps -- four that we heard about earlier today. Two of these seem to be very focused on IT, but then progress beyond IT. It’s this transition that seems to get people a little tripped up.

We often talk about the platforms that the IT people are focused on. I have project. I have a set of requirements. I’m going to install, manage, and optimize a platform, but at some point, that needs to work toward the business agility. Help us understand the role of the enterprise architect today in making that transition?

Ross: Right now, the enterprise architect would help design the platforms, but the critical thing to recognize about platforms is they represent the underpinnings of processes, which would be data, technology and applications.

Process vision

The architect is working very closely in designing these platforms with people who have a vision of how a process ought to be performed. It might be in terms of an end-to-end process. It might be in terms of a process that’s done repeatedly in different parts of an organization.

But, the architect’s role is to make sure that there is a vision. You may have to help provide that vision as to what that process is, and how it fits into the bigger vision that Dave was talking about. So there is a lot of negotiation and envisioning that becomes part of an architect’s role that is above and beyond just the technology piece and the methodology that we’ve worked so hard at in terms of developing the discipline.

Gardner: Len, when you go out and hear the requirements in the field and you see the need for a professional category, it seems that things are moving so fast that it's almost perhaps a benefit to have this as a loose concept.

So, the question for you is, if business processes are dynamic and continue to be accelerating in how quickly people need to adapt, isn’t the role of the enterprise architect in actually managing adaptability, rather than actually being a category like a lawyer or a doctor?

Fehskens: Yes, but I don’t think that changes the fact that the skills associated with doing architecture are largely independent of the domain that you're working in.

There is a set of capabilities that an architect has to have that are largely independent of where they are working.

There is a set of capabilities that an architect has to have that are largely independent of where they are working. While Dave and Jeanne were talking, I was thinking that, despite the fact that the discipline is so immature as a profession, we're still doing surprisingly well.

In terms of its maturity as a profession, it may be 100 or 200 years back, compared to law or medicine, but on the other hand, the quality of the practice is much more like where medicine and law were 50 year, 25 years ago.

So, there is a disparity between the capability, the quality of the services that enterprise architects are providing, and the maturity of the profession. That's a characteristic of architects. Architects have to be inherently adaptable.

In a lot of cases, we make a big deal about the technical expertise of architects, but in a lot of architectural engagements that I have been involved in, I didn’t actually know anything at all about the subject matter that I was being asked to architect.

What I did know how to do was ask the right questions, find the people who knew the answers to those, and help the people who actually had the information orchestrate, arrange, and understand it in a way that allowed them to solve the problem that they really had.

Dynamic environment

I agree that there is something fundamentally different about the kind of work that architects do, compared to say lawyers and doctors. It is a much more dynamic environment, but the skills to deal with that dynamism are not really dynamic themselves. They're pretty stable in terms of the ability of architects to face a whole host of different kinds of problems and apply the same skills to them in a way that produces successful results.

Gardner: Dave, we heard the need for architects to be evangelists, to rally the troops, to get people on the same page, to hasten transformation, all of which is inherently difficult. So how about leadership? We haven’t heard that word, but it seems that the role of the architect is to really be a leader above many other activities within the organization. What is it about the leadership capability that you think can make or break the enterprise architect?

Hornford: The fundamental with leadership in EA is that architects don’t own things. They are not responsible for the business processes. They are not responsible for the sales results. They are responsible for leading a group of people to that transformation, to that happy place, or to the end-state that you're trying to achieve.

If you don't have good leadership skills, the rest of it fundamentally doesn’t matter. You’ll be sitting back and saying, "Well, if I only had a hammer. If I only had authority, I could make people do things." Well, if you have that authority, you would be the general manager. You’d be the COO. They're looking for someone to assist them in areas of the business at times that they can't be there.

I learned far more about doing EA in an 18-month period, when I was a general manager of a subsidiary for a telephone company. My job was to integrate that into the telephone company. I got that role as the enterprise architect for the integration, but through transformations I became the general manager of the subsidiary.

If you do not lead and do not take the risk to lead, the transformation won’t occur.

I learned more there, because I had the balance between having authority and not having to do some of the softer leadership, and coaching myself into doing the changes that were necessary. Seeing that transformation was a great learning experience, because it highlighted that you must lead as an architect. If you do not lead and do not take the risk to lead, the transformation won’t occur. One of the barriers for the profession today is that many architects are not prepared to take the risk of leadership.

Gardner: Jeanne, what about this issue of authority? Just because the enterprise architect has the vision -- and maybe has a very good plan as to what should take place in a particular way for that particular company -- at this particular time they don’t have the budget and the authority. If they can’t marshal those people who do have the budget and authority to cooperate -- wow, lost opportunity. Let’s discuss the issue of authority, and the role of the enterprise architect.

Ross: That’s quite a dilemma. In an environment where the architect can see the possibilities and can’t get the commitment of other people, it’s really not possible to win that. One of two things has to happen. Either the architect is successful in spreading the word and getting commitment or the architect should go somewhere where that’s possible, because I just don’t think you can successfully pursue architecture alone. You can’t just go off in a corner and be a successful architect, as we’ve been discussing here.

The first thing you do, because you are in an environment where you get it and you see it and you know what needs to be done, is that you do everything you can to get commitment across managers who can make things happen. But, there are situations where that’s not going to happen, and you're better off finding an organization that’s longing for good architecture talent -- and they're out there. There are plenty of organizations looking for architects to help them down that path.

Hornford: A key point that Jeanne made this morning in her presentation was the fundamental for commitments. If those commitments aren’t there, the organization will not absorb, consume, or benefit from EA.

Compelling value proposition

Fehskens: A phrase that you’ll hear architects use a lot is "compelling value proposition." The authority of an architect ultimately comes from their ability to articulate a compelling value proposition for architecture in general, for specific architect in a specific situation. Jeanne is absolutely right. Even if you have a compelling value proposition and it falls on deaf ears, for whatever reason, that’s the end of the road.

There isn’t any place you can go, because the only leverage an architect has is the ability to articulate a compelling value proposition that says, "I’ve recognized this. I acknowledge this is promise, but here’s why you have reason to believe that I can actually deliver on this and that when I have delivered on this, this thing itself will deliver these promised benefits."

But, you have to be able to make that argument and you have to be able to do it in the language of the audience that you're speaking to. This is probably one of the biggest problems that architects coming from a technical background have. They'll tell you about features and functions but never get around talking about benefits.

My experience with businesspeople is they don’t really care how you do something. All they care is what results you're going to produce. What you do is just a black box. All they care about is whether or not the black box delivers all the promises that it made.

To convince somebody that you can actually do this, that the black box will actually solve this problem without going into the details of the intricacies and sort of trying to prove that if I just show you how it works then you’ll obviously come to the conclusion that it will do what I promise, you can’t do that that. For most audiences that just doesn’t work. That’s probably one of the most fundamental skills that architects need in order to work through this problem -- getting people to buy into what they are trying to sell.

The thing to recognize about business agility is that it’s a journey. You don’t want to start making your compelling business values something you can't deliver for three years.

Gardner: Based on what we’ve been hearing here at the conference, the metric of success and perhaps even the lever to get the authority and commitment is this notion of business agility. As Dave pointed out, business agility can be very different for different companies at different times. It could be a divestiture. It could be growing into a new market. It could be acquiring, or what have you.

So, if we need to get to business agility with our focus on the short-term as well the long-term strategy, what is it that an enterprise architect needs to do in order to assess and project business agility? Perhaps the more technical folks are not used to something like that?

Ross: The thing to recognize about business agility is that it’s a journey. You don’t want to start making your compelling business values something you can't deliver for three years. Many times the path to agility is through risk management, where you can demonstrate the ability of the IT unit to reduce downtime to increase security or lower cost. The IT unit can often find ways to lower IT cost or to lower operational cost through IT.

So, many times, the compelling value proposition for agility is down the road. We've already learned how to save money. Then, it’s an easier sell to say, "Oh, you know, we haven’t used IT all that well in the past, but now we can make you more agile." I just don’t think anybody is going to buy it.

It’s a matter of taking it a step at a time, showing the organization what IT can help them do, and then, over time, there's this natural transition. In fact, I'm guessing a lot of organizations say, "Look, we're more agile than we used to be." It wasn’t because they said they were going to be agile, but rather because they said they were going to keep doing things better day after day.

Common ground

Gardner: Because the economy remains difficult, because budgets are under pressure, this notion of cost could be really a good common ground to bind areas that perhaps have been disparate in -- in terms of IT, business, and so forth.

Len, what about that -- enterprise architects as cost-cutters or cost-optimizers? Is this a short-term, let’s do this because the economy requires it, or is that really a key fundamental point of successful architects?

Fehskens: No, it’s a long-term requirement. It goes back to what the essence of architecture is about. Architects are ultimately charged with making sure that whatever it is that they're architecting is fit for purpose. Fitness for purpose involves not doing any more than you absolutely have to.

The notion of engineering efficiency is built into the architectural concept. It goes back to an idea that that was developed in the 1980s in the business process re-engineering movement which was the best way to make things simpler is to get rid of stuff. And, the stuff that you need to get rid of is the stuff that’s not essential or doesn’t really address the specific mission that you're trying to achieve.

Architects don’t cut costs for the sake of cutting costs. They cut costs by removing unnecessary cruft from whatever it is that they're responsible for architecting and focusing in on the stuff that really matters and the stuff that’s actually going to deliver the value, not stuff that’s there because it looks keen or because it’s the latest technology widget or whatever. Again, that’s an inherent property of what it is that architects do.

Cost cutting itself is not the goal. The goal is ultimately efficiency and making sure that you're not wasting time doing stuff.

Just as agility is, in some respects, a side-effect of what architects do, we need to keep in mind that agility is a means to the end of alignment. You can have a lot of agility if you never achieve alignment. Then, you're just continuously misaligned.

Similarly, the cost-cutting itself is not the goal. The goal is ultimately efficiency and making sure that you're not wasting time doing stuff. That doesn’t matter, because you are not only wasting time, but you are obviously wasting money, and you're committing resources that are necessary to solve this problem. Actually, those additional resources sometimes just get in the way, they make things worse, rather than making things better.

The architect’s approach to dealing with the architectural way of problem solving means that agility and cost cutting sort of are not short-term focuses. They are just built into the idea of why we do architecture in the first place.

Hornford: And that cost isn’t necessary. A lot of people focus on IT cost. It is cost to the business.

Gardner: Total cost?

Hornford: Total cost, and it’s not agility of your IT infrastructure, but agility of your business. If you lose that linkage, you lose the alignment that Len mentioned. Then, you're not able to deliver the compelling value preposition.

Gardner: We talked earlier about the notion of moving from a platform mentality to a business process and agility mentality. We hear a lot from the vendors and suppliers. They have a role in this as well. The architects are beavering away in these companies, trying to change culture and transform the business, but we hear marketing from the vendors, "If you do this product, this platform, or this technology, it will solve your problems."

Is there a message to the enterprise architects that they should be taking to their organization about the role of the vendors, and is that changing from what we’ve perceived in the past as the role of a vendor or a supplier? Len?

Limit to leverage

Fehskens: Big question. The short answer is, yes. I often joke that every architect will answer the question "yes ... but." So, here comes the but. There is a limit to the leverage you have over suppliers, and the architects have to work with the material that’s available to them. Hopefully, the vendors are listening to the needs of their customers and doing the same kind of thing on their side that architects are trying to do.

Gardner: Don’t the suppliers have to adjust too?

Fehskens: Yeah. It’s a big ecosystem. If you’re selling something that nobody needs or wants, you’re going to go out of business. Suppliers have to be adaptable to the needs of the customers, who are changing. We’re all in this big dance, and everybody is trying to avoid stepping on somebody else’s feet or tripping up and falling over their own.

How does that sort itself out? That’s a difficult question to answer, because there are time-lags and some organizations misread the environment in the current business climate, and they go out of business. Other organizations are very good at anticipating future needs by looking at the trends. They happen to be in the right place at the right time, when somebody needs something they’ve got and it’s available, and they end up winning the battle.

So, yes, we all have to learn how to cooperate. One of the goals of professionalizing the discipline is making it possible for architects on both sides of that relationship to communicate with one another in language that they both understand and recognize that you can’t optimize your side at the expense of other side, because at some point that’s going to come back and bite you. We have to make it possible for architects to have those conversations and to make it apparent to the businesspeople on both sides what the business value is.

A big part of architecture work has been around the development of standards that facilitate interoperability. In many respects, conforming to interoperability standard is counter intuitive to a business, because you basically give away whatever proprietary advantage you have by locking in the customer doing it your own way.

On the other hand, the same mechanism that allows you to lock a customer in also allows the customer to lock you out.

On the other hand, the same mechanism that allows you to lock a customer in also allows the customer to lock you out -- if they decide that they get better payoff from taking advantage of interoperability amongst multiple or other vendors who’ve agreed to collaborate and adopt a particular standard. It’s all about reading the environment and responding appropriately. This ultimately goes back to the idea of fitness for purpose.

Gardner: Jeanne, the relationship between the enterprise architect, the business, and the supplier -- is this an evolving dance? What are some of the new choreography steps?

Ross: I'm not sure I know the dance yet! One benefit we get from good architecture is that we understand the process components and the underlying technology and application from data components, which allows us to take advantage of what’s on the market.

If there is a good component, we can grab it, and if there is not, then we don’t need to take it. What architecture is doing -- and I think we’re seeing vendors start to respond to this, but have a long way to go -- is spur a real developing marketplace for the components that many organizations need. I look out there and I say, "Now pretty much everyone gets it that they don’t have to provide any benefits internally to their employees, because you can outsource that." We get that component. It’s a plug and play.

Core to the business

There are things that are more core to the business that we’ll see more available. I don’t think the architects are going to also become the vendor managers. They're the ones who are going to design the components and recognize the interfaces, but they’ll be working closely with the vendors to make sure the pieces come together.

Gardner: It does seem that the vendors are appreciating that they’re elevating their role inside their enterprises. The notion of EA is elevating beyond platforms. The vendor response seems to be that, "We’ll provide everything -- we’ll merge, acquire, and provide everything at an architectural level." Do you think that’s the right way?

Ross: I should note that I use the term “platform” differently from you. There is technology platform, which I think is what you are referring to, but there are digitized process platforms that are really valuable, and many times vendors can provide the whole thing. Software as a service (SaaS) is a partial example, but actual business process outsourcing really accomplishes that. I think of these as potential platforms for organizations.

But, there is a fine line between a platform and an outsourced process, and organizations are trying to piece that together. What's our platform? What are the components for plugging into and taking out of that platform? That’s the architectural challenge. I feel like I just didn’t answer your question, but it is the thought that came to my mind.

Gardner: It occurs to me that this is another point of variability, and that the architect needs to not only consider the variables internally, but suppliers are redefining themselves, and cloud computing is pushing the envelope on what you would consider as sourcing options.

Different organizations will have different things that matter to them.

So, Dave, last question before we close up. This notion of a dynamic environment for sourcing and vendors redefining their role, perhaps trying to expand their role, sounds to me like the enterprise architect’s role becomes more critical as a result.

Hornford: I'd agree with that. If we're going to look at our sourcing options, using the word "component" as opposed to "platform," I can acquire a benefit. I can acquire a benefits engine as a service or I can build my own and manage my own processes, whether fully manual or digitized. Those choices come down to my value in the business.

Different organizations will have different things that matter to them. They will structure and compose their businesses for a different value chain for a different value proposition to their customers.

If we get back to the core of what an architect has to deliver, it’s understanding what is the business’s value, where are we delivering value to my customers? How that organization is structured, how it succeeds, how it gets its agility, and how it gets its cost may be different for different organizations. We have a larger collection of tools available to us without a clear, "This is the right answer. Everyone does it this way."

Gardner: Well, we’ll have to wrap it up there. It’s obviously a deep and interesting subject, and we will be revisiting it often, I'm sure. We've been discussing the advancing role and powerful potential for EA, and how practitioners and leaders face a vast new promise for IT business alignment improvement. But there are also quite a few missing parts, and perhaps even a lost opportunity, if you don’t do this and your competitor does.

This sponsored podcast discussion is coming to you from The Open Group Conference in Boston. We're here in the week of July 19, 2010. Please join me in thanking our guests, Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist for the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Thank you.

Ross: Thank you so much, Dana.

Gardner: We are also here with Dave Hornford, Architecture Practice Principal at Integritas Solutions, as well as the Chairman of The Open Group’s Architecture Forum. Thank you, Dave.

Hornford: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And also Len Fehskens, Vice President of Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group. Thanks, Len.

Fehskens: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’ve been listening to BriefingsDirect. Thanks for joining, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast on the potential of enterprise architecture, resistance in the business community, and finding common ground. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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