Abstract

The Strategic Enterprise Architect’s Dilemma presents a theoretical basis and a practical methodology for architecting flexible enterprise capabilities in a disruptive context. It includes many examples from the authors’ work with clients, research, courses they developed and taught, and communities of practice they led at major technology companies.

The book develops a framework and approach based on the following key ideas:

  1. Technology and enterprise architecture (EA) are indeed strategic to many enterprises, but what this entails needs to be reconsidered. While many enterprises have already embraced strategic EA, a number of EA concepts and methods must now integrate fitness for the ever-changing, disruptive context.
  2. Sudden, disruptive changes in the context require rapid adaptation. Enterprises need to embrace just-in-case thinking and build in the flexibility to adapt capabilities for plausible scenarios.
  3. Day-one mistakes can have large and lasting consequences. A major day-one mistake is to act before understanding the uncertainty inherent in the context.
  4. Strategic EA begins with people, not technology. Every successful architectural initiative starts with engaging key stakeholders (including those with different technology-adoption profiles) and reaching a consensus.
  5. Architects must balance fitness for today’s purpose with fitness for tomorrow’s disruptive context. Fitness is the key to surviving and thriving in disruptive times.
  6. Because ongoing fitness is key, EA must focus on adaptability. The enterprise needs to be fit for the changing context, and the scenarios represent the strategic stakeholders’ best guess about the plausible futures they need to be ready for—and the capability adaptations that will be required. In essence, the scenarios drive the evolution of the strategic enterprise architecture. We call this concept “Scenario-Driven Strategic EA.”
  7. The enterprise needs to adapt its capability effectively enough to remain relevant and attractive to its clients. Not only must the enterprise make the right adaptations with the right qualities, it must make them in a timely manner, that is, as quickly as the context requires—but no quicker.

The book introduces six Strategic EA views and an Adaptive Enterprise Cycle methodology that emphasizes capability fitness, including continuous learning and adaptation. The views and methodology “mash up” concepts and approaches from many disciplines, helping practitioners make enterprise architecture strategic and actionable.

The book is a highly scannable collection of key information (both text and graphics) along with deeper discussions and examples.