In Step With: Jeanne Ross, Principal Research Scientist, MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research

Hoping to spread the enterprise architecture gospel internationally, Jeanne Ross recently traveled to a small resort in the French Alps for a series of meetings. Famished, she approached the concierge to inquire about a restaurant or room service. Being mid-afternoon, everything was closed until evening and she disconsolately made her way back to her room, perking up enormously when she noticed the Cheetos in the welcome pack that Pepsico had left in her room. Not a dream French meal for the weary EA expert, but a happy sight nonetheless.

Growing up in Belleville, Illinois, topics of architecture and governance were far from Jeanne Ross' planned future. Thinking her life's mission was to teach seminarians how to deliver compelling sermons, she earned her BA from the University of Illinois in Speech Communications. But upon graduating she instead headed to Washington for a brief stint as a lobbyist.

Deciding to earn an MBA, Jeanne then went to the prestigious Wharton School where she gained an expertise in Accounting. It was only when she was teaching Accounting at a small college in Wisconsin that she was asked to add IT to her course load. Expressing a lack of knowledge around IT, Jeanne was reassured - “why, it's just like Accounting!”

To her credit, she was sponsored to receive a PhD in Management Information Systems from the University of Wisconsin and the Enterprise Architecture world gained a dynamic spokeswoman from that point on.

Working today as Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research, Jeanne travels the world conducting EA research and authors important works with her colleagues at MIT.

“It was purely via research that I got into Enterprise Architecture. I was looking at how companies were trying to transform themselves. Over time, I came to recognize that the consistency between the operating vision of a company and its enterprise or organizational architecture was the key to the ability to transform. That led me to a different view of EA. While IT people often take a technical view, I look at EA as a strategic business issue. For IT, EA is the combination of the technology, data, applications and process architectures.”

On a day-to-day basis, Jeanne conducts research nearly every day, working in an almost completely virtual arrangement with her colleagues. In fact, she actually resides in Columbus, Ohio. “At the Center, we focus on how to derive value from IT. I do case studies, looking through different lenses to understand IT value. We also touch on infrastructure transformations, ERP and e-business transformations, not to mention Outsourcing, IT management, data analysis and Knowledge Management,” Jeanne said. But now that she has studied enterprise architecture, she views all of these topics through an architecture lens. She sees enterprise architecture as the map that fits these pieces together in a way that they can add value to a business.

Jeanne has traveled extensively, working with thought-leading organizations of every stripe. “In the US, when companies go global, they start with a vision based on extending an architecture that they build up in their large and fairly homogenous home country,” says Jeanne. “Whereas in Europe, it's very different. They deal with 28 or more countries and are less focused on defining ‘the single architecture’. I mean, they think that would be ‘nice’ but cultural reasons prohibit it. They are more aware of how hard it's going to be.

“The best part of studying Enterprise Architecture is that it's a long term vision and it's totally different from the architecture for a building - more like city planning. I often counsel IT professionals to engage business managers in discussions about architecture without using IT terminology. If they can free themselves of that language, then the concept gets through. Explaining EA without IT terms - that's a wonderful way for IT people to learn to express EA for a non-technical audience,” Jeanne said.

When asked about the future of EA, Jeanne adds “Columbus sailed for India, ended up in the Americas, and declared success - that will be the reality of our efforts. EA will set the direction and provide the vision. As reality imposes on our plans, we'll never quite build out our elegant vision but that's ok.”

by Jessica McMahon, Managing Editor of A&G Magazine