I use analogies a lot - in my teaching, consulting, and just about everywhere else! By no means a panacea, a well chosen analogy can make things "click" for people who might otherwise not "get it." "Selling" Enterprise Architecture I've blogged frequently about Enterprise Architecture (and its subset, IT Architecture) because I believe it is [...]
I've been thinking about IT architecture - more correctly, Enterprise Architecture, and most recently, something I'm referring to as Ecosystem Architecture. This thinking was stimulated by some of the results of our recent Reaching Level 3 multi-company research project. That research showed that one of the most critical gaps in many companies IT capabilities is [...]
I've referenced Enterprise Architecture several times in this blog, and see it (or lack thereof!) as a common "sticking point" (see, for Example, Enterprise Architecture and Level 2 Sticking Point) as it's one of those things that does not naturally "grow" out of less mature practices (IT Architecture, for example) but takes a different twist [...]
I think the dependencies between EA and SOA are just now really being understood. I've recently been involved in a multi-company research project on the Business Implications of SOA. Based upon that research, and what I see in the IT shops I get to work with over the years, I believe a strong EA capability and [...]
One of the manifestations of the mid-Level 2 sticking point referred to in an earlier post is around Enterprise Architecture (EA). At the risk of over simplifying, way back, most IT shops had some kind of Technology Architecture (TA) capability - usually focused on selecting and enforcing standards, providing an overall schema and logic for physical [...]
I was introduced to the phenomenon of Business-IT Convergence in the late 1980’s by one of the world’s leading IT thinkers and teachers—Professor James Cash, then Professor and Senior Associate Dean at Harvard Business School. I had just delivered a presentation about Business-IT Alignment to an audience of CIOs. The presentation was well received, and [...]
IT Organizations are complex organisms that have to deal with rapidly changing, complicated subjects. Such environments are fascinating places for organizational archaeologists and anthropologists to study, revealing layer upon layer of legacy architectures, organizing structures, artifacts and sub-cultures. While the technologies we manage change quickly, the methods and structures we use to manage them [...]
I come across a whole heap (yes, that’s a technical term!) of “role confusion” in my consulting and training work. And it’s an insidious issue. Lack of role clarity leads to errors, miscommunication, redundancy, noise and wasted effort. It creates frustration, confusion, and, for a provider such as an IT organization, it leads to a [...]
In their groundbreaking book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, published in 1997, co-authors Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema argued that companies that have taken leadership positions in their industries have typically done so by focusing their strategy on one of three value disciplines, and optimizing their business operating models accordingly. They don't ignore the other [...]
In Part 1 of this post I pointed out why I'd named this blog "IT Organization Circa 2017" and why I'd picked 2017. I then offered some musings about the nature and shape of the IT Organization Circa 2017. I set this up by examining the major disruptive forces acting on the IT organization today: [...]