In my last post, I discussed how the emergence of Internet technologies are driving down the cost to acquire, understand and act on information.  As a result, traditional processes for many enterprise architecture organizations are requiring a substantial rethinking of strategy.

In this post, we will explore new tools and light processes that traditional EA can use to take advantage of the emergence of Web 2.0 on the nature of today’s firm. 

The Minimum Viable Product

Enterprise Architecture has regularly gotten a bad wrap for being an ivory tower.  Many projects spend too much time documenting information about the architecture and not enough time developing and testing ideas and scenarios. 

In the Web 2.0 startup community, a major focus is on developing lightweight solutions that are iterated rapidly based on customer feedback and needed enhancements.  This technique can be applied to IT strategy by collecting only enough information necessary to answer key questions and lay the ground work for further discovery and iteration.

As Eric Ries, a leading voice in the lean startup community notes:  the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

You can hear Eric speak more about this concept here: http://www.youtube.com/user/StartupLessonsLearne#play/uploads/3/E4ex0fejo8w
 

Listening to the Crowd

There have never been more solutions available to understand and collaborate with your community than ever before.  While the emergence of social networking tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have been a boon for personal networking and knowledge discovery, many of these kinds of services are not available inside the firewall. 

Now another set of enterprise ready social tools are coming to market that allow teams to discover, plan, manage and collaborate with enterprise class security and scalability.

Yammer – Twitter for the enterprise.  Unlike Twitter, whose central question is “What are you doing”,  Yammer asks “What are you working on”.  And each Yammer network is constrained to employees with a common email domain at a corporation.   A recent article in the New York Times discusses the pros and cons of Yammer and Twitter in the enterprise.  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/technology/start-ups/21twitter.html?_r=1&hp

Another tool that Enterprise Architects should use for understanding their customers and the broader community is online idea submission and survey tools like Uservoice and Get Satisfaction.  User Voice (www.uservoice.com) allows anyone to launch a collaborative site where your community can submit ideas that will help you better understand where improvements need to be made and what they could be.  From there, your community can vote the best ideas the top of the list – no more guess work on what your customers want – they tell you.

For the enterprise architect and IT Strategist, stealing a page out of the Web 2.0 playbook makes a great deal of sense.  You can apply techniques that are on the cutting edge of product development to your architecture practice, and as a result, generate better answers, faster, with much more support from your customers.