Making Business Transformation Real

It happens once a quarter, or twice a year, or maybe even on an annual basis. The CEO and executive team sit down at a table and talk about goals and objectives. In these meetings, the CEO typically owns the vision. She talks, for example, about how many stores she wants to open or how many countries she wants to sell into.

Then she turns it over to her vice presidents and directors, who present their pet projects. Usually, he who has the prettiest slide deck and speaks the loudest gets their project selected, whether or not that project is aligned with the CEO’s vision.

Finally, there’s the IT group, sitting around the table, wondering how they are going to transform IT and accommodate all these projects in order to make the CEO’s vision of a Future State a reality.

Rarely are the Future State, as described by the CEO, and the projects connected. This leaves the IT group in a quandary, unless they are willing to embrace the tools and methods associated with transforming the business through the use of Enterprise Architecture.

To accomplish this, the company’s executives and other leaders must create a series of roadmaps that identify product life cycles, new product introductions, etc. In essence, they are looking at new products coming on and the transformation of old product lines that are being re-introduced.

This defines the role of Enterprise Architecture professionals. Their role is to go back to this current state and make it real. In fact, EA professionals map that Future State. Getting to that position in the first place is where the initial challenge lies.

The majority of corporations do not have enterprise architecture professionals because their organizational structure excludes the kind of collaboration and communications that EA professionals thrive on. In essence, corporate strategy is distinct from IT, rather than being wedded to it.

Forward-thinking companies, by contrast, recognize the disconnect. They create enterprise program management offices or enterprise architecture groups that have purview over both the business architecture and the technology architecture processes.

Even so, this may not be enough to fully transform the business. Traditionally, the responsibilities of EA professionals have involved defining that Future State. They were assigned to create a model, and maybe even suggest guidelines or standards that people would have to adhere to make that future state possible. But rarely were the EA professionals as proactive as they need to be to ensure success. To fully realize their potential, they should embrace these basic tenets:

• Look at new projects first and make sure they are aligned
• When opening any project for maintenance, view it as an opportunity to make changes
• Actively go back and make changes to existing projects, even if they aren’t being reviewed

When EA professionals think about what it means to look at an incoming project and try to see whether or not it is online, or to look at something that is already in place and decide whether it is online, what they are really doing is kind of holding the projects up to the light.

They might say, “Here’s my incoming project. Here’s my Future State. What’s the gap between the two?” So the gap is really a standards management problem.

In other words, “Here’s the way I would like to see things laid out. Here’s a corporate directive here. Here’s a corporate directive there.” Now when EA professionals get a new project and hold it up to the light, they can say, “Well I am hitting here, but I am missing there.” They need to be able to score the incoming projects against the Enterprise Architecture.

With a defined Enterprise Architecture, they don’t have to have any knowledge of what is already out there in order to do that. There’s no need for an as-is environment map, which is an important distinction.

If all they want to do is to make sure that they are not going to make things worse by starting new projects, then they need to compare your new projects to their desired state and they need to do that through this standards management comparison.

If, however, they want to go back and look at things that are already in place to make sure that they are in line with their desired state, then they do need knowledge of their as-is environment. But the problem is similar in that once they have that knowledge, they are comparing a representation of an as-is environment with a representation of where they want to be.

Good companies will have something in place to look at incoming projects and how closely they align to the desired state. Really advanced companies are now looking backward, too. They see Enterprise Architecture as the key to their future.

by Hank Weghorst, the Founder and CEO of Troux Technologies.