#6 — The Enterprise Architect
In an in depth Survey that McKinsey conducted with the Henley Business School in 2016 (“How Enterprise Architects can help to ensure success in Digital Transformation”) 40% of the respondents said that the business leaders in their companies were not aware of what the EA and the EA group does.
I would take a wild guess and say that this is not something that have changed dramatically since then. These numbers would be similar if the survey was conducted now in 2019.
This leads to the belief that many Enterprise Architects are NOT involved in the process of digital transformation and are NOT in the midst of the Innovation roadmap for companies. Enterprise Architecture Management failing to play a critical role is alarming to both company leaders and EA practitioners.
On the one hand, the demand for transparency and business — IT alignment is ever-growing. Without knowing its data, applications or business capabilities, how could any organization meet the introduced challenges of continuous transformation, innovation and enlightenment of the leaders to create the bold leadership which are critical for prosperity or even survival in the long term?
On the other hand, how can we as EA practitioners overcome the reputation of being ivory tower theoreticians that have small or no impact at all on the business?
There are three things that rally need to happen:
- We as Enterprise Architects have to be bold enough to not actually stick with the traits that the current assignment is imposing on us. We have to display all the versatile characteristica that is needed in this fast paced environment.
- The leadership (CEOs, CIOs and existing internal CEs — Chief Entrepreneurs) need to put the spotlight more on these groups by giving them more mandate and responsibility.
- EAs has to mantle leadership roles within the organisation, meaning that they need to act as experts within their fields (with all the the versatile characteristica described under 1) — but also as leaders themselves and people to turn to in this disruptive era of business.
So our role and function within the organization has to change to make us relevant and more interesting to Business Leaders and at the same time we need to be Leaders that people turn to and listen to for advice.
In this article I will discuss 1 and 2, but mostly leave number 3 for later discussions.
The need for new traits
The historic problem of Enterprise Architecture is that the gap between business and IT is too great. This makes the Enterprise Architecture mission impossible, as it is neither feasible nor desirable for one small group to centrally solve such massive gaps. So historically the place where EA teams have had success is with tactical improvements in architecture — far from any real success of truly aligning IT and business.
When “digital is the new black” and everyone screams for innovation the EA should be playing a central role.
But for this to happen, we as practitioners need to make ourselves more visible and build on the traits needed in the new digital world. These can be defined as
1. Ability to execute
Fast assessment of challenges and opportunities and quickly grasp, store, structure and analyze information that could help solve an oncoming problem in the enterprise landscape.
2. Tech-savvy
Gain and withhold the digital skills required to make a difference to provide higher value to their organizations.
3. Agile mindset
Modern Enterprise Architects know agile development systems like Scrum and Kanban and use them to speed up software deployment timelines — by also having a “Project Manager” mindset.
4. Data-driven decisions
All important decisions that modern EAs make should be based on data. Data-driven decisions help leadership make the right investments and ensure the organization is working on the most impactful tasks to improve competitive advantage.
5. Evangelistic
Preach and share excitement about new innovations (software and services). A mindset and skillset that is more similar to an entrepreneur and far away from what the traditional EA role has been seen as.
Given that we as practitioners can display all these traits, we will hold more relevance in the eyes of the business stakeholders. Also by actually getting proactively involved and not waiting for someone to approach us, for example by showing CXOs reports or similar to help them define and implement technical strategy or to create business value from technology, will help in the quest for involvement.
Getting into the Spotlight
By displaying the traits discussed and being proactive the Leadership will probably be more aware of the EA and the EA groups, and in some companies that will directly help us get into the spotlight.
However, in many companies still driven by the finite game playground (short term budgets, arbitrary KPIs, BU operational models etc) this will not be enough to make the EA play key roles when it comes to decision making or in general to give us more mandate or responsibility.
That will still take a leadership that dares to listen to these — in their eyes — “IT people” and trust that they actually understands the business and people aspects of tech/IT. At the same time the EAs needs to dare to challenge the current — but do it in a way that makes sense to the Leaders.
So the closing of the massive gaps between the Business and IT needs to be initiated and implemented by both the business (leaders) and the EAs themselves.
Only then the spotlight can be shining on the EA practitioners in the way needed to make them involved and allow them to add value to digitization projects.
Once EAs can get deeply involved in digitization projects, the Enterprise Architecture Study from McKinsey shows that collaborations, documentation and communication between business and IT will work much better — which will continue to mend the gap and establish the EA as an important piece of the puzzle.
In this new setup of the change journey the leadership skills of the EA will be put to a test.
That I will get into in the next article, #7 — EA leaders of the future.
