Part I provides an overview of The Strategic Enterprise Architect’s Dilemma in five chapters
Strategic Enterprise Architecture is a new discipline that unifies strategy and enterprise architecture (EA) to focus on helping the Enterprise survive and thrive in disruptive times.
This means that participants in the strategic conversation must continuously:
A long-standing architect’s saying is “Don’t just build it right, build the right thing.” Our updated Strategic EA version:
This book deals with many concepts that may be familiar to strategists and enterprise architects. However, in our experience, the terms used for these concepts and what people understand them to mean often differ. Accordingly, we start by defining the basic terms and concepts we use. In addition, we believe that many readers may need to revisit strategic EA to analyze what needs to change when we prioritize fitness for a changing context.
This chapter includes the following topics:
This chapter explores the central dilemma of the book introduced at the start of Part I: balancing fitness for today’s purpose with fitness for tomorrow’s disruptive context. It includes the following topics:
T his chapter presents the solution to the central dilemma of the book introduced at the start of Part I. It includes the following topics:
This part includes the following sections:
It answers the following questions:
This chapter focuses on the Strategic Enterprise Architecture Views, introduced in Chapter 5 and highlighted in Figure 26, below. It covers:
The key enterprise fitness concepts covered by each view, and why each is needed.
T he enterprise essentials are the core, relatively stable elements of an enterprise that define its identity and distinctive character. Getting the essentials right is the starting point for determining and improving enterprise fitness. The Enterprise Essentials view provides an architectural description of the enterprise essentials and the relationships of this view to the other views.
The Strategic Context viewis a structured representation of an enterprise’s changing strategic context that provides a common reference for strategic stakeholders, highlighting what they consider to be important. This chapter provides details on the contents of the Strategic Context view and its relationships to the other views.
The Strategic Stakeholders viewis a structured representation of the enterprise’s most influential stakeholders. The view:
The Capability Architecture viewis a structured representation of an enterprise’s capability, systems, and ecosystem, aligned with enterprise strategy, that guides improvement initiatives.
Chapter 12: The Strategic Fitness View 222
The Strategic Fitness view constitutes a “health check” for the enterprise as a whole. Changes in strategic fitness drive updating of the strategy, “to-be” capability architecture considerations, and strategic initiatives for capabilities, systems, and ecosystems.
The view includes stakeholder evaluations of the enterprise’s past, current, and future fitness based on contextual and enterprise factors. It also helps strategic stakeholders quickly spot the areas of unfitness that need improvement for the enterprise to adapt quickly and effectively to emerging conditions.
Chapter 13: The Strategic Initiatives View 252
The Strategic Initiatives view is a comprehensive list of proposals, plans, and projects for realizing the strategic direction and enhancing the fitness of the enterprise’s capabilities, systems, and ecosystem for the strategic context. The view:
This chapter focuses on the methodology, which uses the phases of the Adaptive Enterprise Cycle to guide the Strategic Enterprise Architecture definition and execution. In this chapter, we consider each Cycle phase in detail. For each phase, we provide checklist questions both for the phase itself and for each of the six views as used in the phase. Since IG&L relates to all phases and views, we provide checklists for both.
In this chapter we explore the tools and methods first introduced in Chapter 5:
This part focuses on concrete steps that architects can take to address the dilemma, including how to understand current and future capability needs (as identified by strategists and other strategic stakeholders) and how to incorporate the requisite flexibility to maintain fitness for the ever-changing context.
We provide four examples to illustrate how different aspects of the views, methods, and tools address the dilemma.
The sustainability of an enterprise—its ability to survive and thrive in a changing context—directly relates to its ongoing fitness. Can the enterprise rapidly adapt its capability to remain relevant and valuable to its customers and other stakeholders?
This chapter introduces some basic aspects of fitness. We begin by exploring how to focus on fitness even when the six views are sparsely populated. Key to the necessary adaptations is recognizing the context changes and developing strategies for dealing with plausible futures. We list some common activities that can help uncover possible contextual changes that are relevant to the enterprise.
The Adaptive Enterprise Cycle describes how the Strategic Enterprise Architecture is created and updated, and how it impacts each phase of the development and deployment of the capability and supporting systems.
An important part of the strategy is the creation of plausible future scenarios for which the enterprise capability must be able to adapt to remain fit. The Strategic Enterprise Architect can play a critical role, both by helping construct scenarios and by identifying what updates are needed to the architecture and systems to provide the flexibility necessary to remain fit.
How does an enterprise determine what contextual changes to pay attention to? Which disruptions are relevant to the enterprise? Which changes could impact the fitness of the enterprise capability?
In this chapter we explore the kinds of disruptions an enterprise might face and what obstacles might prevent them from recognizing these disruptions. We then return to balancing our responses to disruptions by deciding what actions are good enough.
This chapter focuses on disruptions caused by actions of enterprises. Who is disrupting? How and when do we recognize a disruption? How soon do we respond? How do we know that we’re taking the right steps?
We also look at opportunities. Do we have a chance to disrupt in a way that will improve our standing? What do we need to consider? How might our efforts to disrupt backfire, causing unintended consequences for our own enterprise? How can we recognize such undesirable consequences and mitigate them?
We believe that scenario-driven Strategic Enterprise Architecture provides an effective approach for recognizing disruptions and taking steps to avoid or respond to the potential impact of the context change. We cover how scenarios complemented by strategic signals help enterprises sense and interpret disruptions early so that they can adapt in a timely and effective manner.
How to use the views across the different phases of the lifecycle
The views introduced in Part II are designed to capture and organize essential aspects of Strategic Enterprise Architecture. This chapter focuses on how each view is used in specific phases of the Adaptive Enterprise Cycle.
Starting with scenarios, we explore how to populate and use the views in each phase of the cycle.
We use models, principles, drivers, goals, and metrics to help understand, develop approaches, and provide ways to adjust system qualities to fit changing contexts.
Being able to recognize what is really happening and may happen often depends on existing mental models. Getting them right can have a crucial impact on the enterprise’s ability to survive and thrive.
Do strategic stakeholders frame contextual challenges in ways that allow them to sense and interpret the enterprise’s real situation effectively? Can they recognize when a frame is deliberately created to mislead strategists, ignoring emerging changes that have substantial disruptive potential? These issues are critical, so we cover mental models and frames in some detail.
It is sometimes said that the three most important factors for any architecture are “scope, scope, and scope.” It is virtually impossible to create an effective Strategic Enterprise Architecture without a clear understanding of scope. We use our earlier scope models to understand how models change based on scenario uncertainties.
Many enterprises fail to sufficiently analyze how their systems can fail. A robust capability must be ready to adjust to a disruptive changing context. When things go wrong, the ability to react rapidly and fix what’s wrong is central to the enterprise’s sustainability.
This chapter explains how to use architectural principles in crafting effective architectural descriptions. Good principles will not only clarify what is essential but also what is good enough and can remain fit for purpose and context over time.
We augment the common meaning of principle and explain how to include a number of additional factors that clarify the intended meaning of the principle for stakeholders, including architects and developers.
Good principles articulate what is essential about a capability or system and should remain true for an extended period. However, things change. As noted in Chapter 1 the fundamental principle of adaptive architecting builds in the flexibility to adjust enterprise capabilities and systems to plausible changes in the context. This flexibility ensures that the overall strategy and top-level principles can remain relatively constant in the presence of most disruptions. Lower-level strategy and principles will need to be revised more often.
The highest-level principles explain the overall enterprise capability and attempt to keep it long-lived. They also form the root of a goals-means hierarchy that is most stable at the top (the root) and changes most frequently at the bottom (leaf) level.
Principles can also play a key role in clarifying system qualities—how they are incorporated and balanced. We cover the FUSERS Qualities Framework in detail from this perspective.
Principles can be particularly effective for expressing what is good enough both now and in the future. At the end of the chapter, we explore this, including its application to two important sustainability maxims.
Why do we so often hear about systems built and rolled out that fail to support the capabilities for which they were funded and designed?
The problem is often twofold:
In this chapter, we cover the experience that Strategic Enterprise Architects would ideally have, including scenario development, decision making, and communication with key stakeholders. Important projects will often include trading off system qualities, transferring knowledge, and recognizing system deficiencies and how to address them.
We believe that a model from teaching hospitals—of practice, research, and teaching—can be very effective in developing successful Strategic Enterprise Architects.
We introduce four examples of enterprise disruptions to illustrate different facets of the Strategic Enterprise Architecture views, methodology, methods, and tools.
We start by considering some general questions enterprises might ask about disruptions at each stage of the Adaptive Enterprise Cycle.
This example compares the potentially proactive and reactive approaches of an enterprise faced with a technological disruption, in this case, smart phones.
The NotPetya worm is considered to be the most destructive worm in terms of aggregate costs to enterprises. We consider the impact on the large shipping company, Maersk, and how scenarios with just-in-case planning might have avoided or at least mitigated the costly impact.
One of the most serious issues facing medical personnel is burnout, caused in part by the electronic healthcare systems that they are required to use. The success of an enterprise capability is largely based on the impact on key stakeholders. Architecting based on FUSERS considerations can significantly affect the success of the capability and supporting systems.
The COVID-19 pandemic was not a surprise for those who had been watching earlier pandemics. In March 2015, Bill Gates famously predicted a global pandemic and included scenario planning in his call to action. Yet many healthcare facilities and governments were seriously unprepared. We discuss the pandemic in terms of the Capability and Resource Viability model introduced in Figure 21 at the beginning of Part II.
The views and methodology presented in Parts I through III will only be effective if the enterprise actually recognizes the importance of fitness for future disruptive contexts, and values the role that Strategic Enterprise Architecture can play.
Chapter 22 focuses on the efforts needed to get an organization interested in following the ideas presented so far, from convincing management to give it a try, to the steps needed to carry out such a program—including dealing with obstacles and avoiding pitfalls.
The enterprise may well wish to adapt the methodology to their particular industry or domain. We expect that most enterprises, for example, will need to modify the checklists to suit their way of doing things.
Enterprises will likely not have considered a good number of the ideas presented in this book. Introducing new roles and new ways of working can be an uphill battle in any organization.
Senior management will not get on board with Strategic Enterprise Architecture if they do not see clear-cut advantages to adopting these ideas. The first step is to get somebody who is willing to give Strategic EA a try. They need to be convinced of the dilemma and the need to address fitness for tomorrow’s disruptive context as well as today’s purpose.
In many cases there will be pushback—obstacles, objections, etc. Architects should test the approaches with projects of limited scope, so that those involved can gradually become familiar with the concepts and terms, methodology, etc. In this chapter, we include a number of pitfalls to avoid, but our list is not exhaustive. Adopters should add other obstacles that may be specific to their enterprise.
Strategic Enterprise Architecture is a work in progress that we believe has a great deal of promise, but careful attention is needed to integrate it effectively into an existing enterprise culture and way of working.