digital

Enterprise Architecture by Design

Alistair Russell · June 27, 2023 · Leave a Comment

It has been a very useful process for us taking Enterprise Architecture (EA) as our theme this month. Not least because its given us the opportunity to review what we have been doing, what we have noticed about what really adds value from doing EA and to consider what’s next. Especially as the rhetoric that EA is only relevant in the so called “old-fashioned”, “largely rejected” and “out-moded” world of waterfall, heavy upfront planning, with governed, gated delivery methods etc. continues and conversations about EA “being dead” persist.

In practice, we know EA as an organisation level capability continues to be relevant, continues to deliver value and it does need to be continually evaluated, redesigned and developed to match the context and strategy of the organisation it serves.

In some ways organisations always have an “EA in use”. They always have a way, no matter how sub-optimal, that designs and plans are evaluated and decided on. Our work as professionals in making sure our organisations have the digital technology they need to support their strategy means we have to get EA right, too.

Our insight is that organisations should take a moment to define what they mean by EA. Engaging the organisation in answering key questions including: What it is for? How will we see value? And in parallel, design the key products and processes that the organisation will use to deliver that value. EA by design. In all our experience comprehensive implementation of any of the frameworks such as The Open Group’s Architecture Framework (TOGAF) rarely is in the interest of the organisation. And as our TOGAF certified colleagues would say – “you were never supposed to do that anyway!”.

Yet selecting specific approaches, designing their implementation to match the business strategy does and will deliver value, fast. Whether its engaging key groups in setting EA principles and integrating them into critical design and delivery processes or initiating an application portfolio review and planning process for say your top 20 most costly services, doing what matters most, well, fast and showing key stakeholders in your organisation how EA delivers value is key.

Time and again we come back to the guiding thought that EA is an enterprise level capability. It’s not a technical one. It may be staffed and supported by largely technical resources but it has to be connected, integrated into the organisation strategy setting, plan making and delivery governance. And as with all areas of organisational development and change, language matters. Language shapes how our colleagues see things and most importantly impacts what they do.

In many ways this builds on our call for “zero-based” EA from a few years ago see

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/zero-based-enterprise-architecture-alistair-russell/

EA by design, getting the right EA in use, depends on these five things:

always ground the language you use to label EA as business process or capability, not an IT one;
design and find your own way to do EA, do talk to your peers and learn from others, but literal adoption of generic best practice will not cut it;
make sure you are always explicit about how and where the organisation will see value from EA;
use agile, emergent approaches to the implementation of EA, start fast, engage others early, help the organisation to learn by doing EA, rather than making the case for EA in abstract;
prepare for and confront the implications of taking a principled, design led approach, choose your battles to assure the long term, sustained delivery of value from digital technology, that’s the point.

Intelligent Governance – Key to value from AI

Alistair Russell · April 20, 2023 · Leave a Comment

We have been holding back on an insight on AI. It felt like a bandwagon not worth jumping on, nor lamely exploiting in pursuit of clicks. Yet we have thoughts, as experienced practitioners in how digital technology delivers value we have insight we thought we would share. If only to clarify for ourselves our position.

First thing we need to do is to set to one side our pedant self. The pedant that notes that the current tools that are touted as AI all over the press are not, in our view, “artificial intelligence”. Whilst ChatGPT may pass the Turing Test, it and the other members of the current generation of tools are not truly artificially intelligent. And yet, getting on an intellectual high horse is in so many ways is not a helpful or productive discussion.

In our view, that’s not the important question. The important questions for us, include:

What are these tools for?
Who are these tools for? And
How do we govern the use of the tools?

And perhaps the hardest questions are the governance questions. For example, what values or ethical perspective do we want to use in governing the use of these tools. We see the governance challenge to be the most important right now. Building governance maturity, intelligent governance that matches the needs of organisations is key. And based on all our experince, that maturity alignment is best achieved by engaging with the tools, experimenting with capabilities and what they mean for you and your organisation, including how do you feel about their capability. As ever learning by doing is the most effective approach.

What’s the Point? Getting Strategy Right

Alistair Russell · April 19, 2023 · Leave a Comment

Prompted by reading and reflecting on a recent article “Getting strategy wrong and how to do it right instead” published in McKinsey Quarterly, we concluded that the best place to start is with the “what’s the point” question.

Real, open, informed discussions amongst senior leaders are essential if you are going to get strategy right. In all our experience, the fundamental, “do not pass go” questions flow from this perspective including:

how will the strategy be used?
what will people do differently as a result of the strategy?
what effect will that different behaviour have?
what benefits should flow from the use of this strategy
who will recognise those benefits?
what differences in what things will key stakeholders notice?
how will those effects be measured?

We find these “what’s the point” questions useful at all levels of our strategic work. Both in defining what we do with, or on behalf of, our clients, what is produced and how it is produced all provide the foundation for getting strategy right.

Whether it’s working across the organisational leadership team interrogating organisational strategy and what it might mean for digital systems, data and technology. Testing for coherence and relative priority of strategic goals and objectives. Or working to review an application portfolio to inform strategic decisions to say invest, migrate or retire key systems. Or developing the set of enterprise architectural principles that technology and organisational leaders will use to test prospective solutions for both business and technical “fit”. All of these strategic activities depend for their success on a clear articulation of what they are for – their point.

Developing key relationships to enable delivery of value

Alistair Russell · March 16, 2023 · Leave a Comment

A recent article in Harvard Business Review identified four elements of the playbook that differentiates organisations that deliver class-leading productivity improvement. The ability to capture value from digitisation was the first of the playbook’s elements.

Based on cross sector research by a team from McKinsey, the playbook’s other elements were “investing in intangibles”, “building a future ready workforce” and “adopting a systems approach”. It prompted us to come back to an enduring issue in our work. How does an organisation develop the ability to capture value from investing in digital technology? What should you do as CIO or senior technology leader to enable, prompt or improve your organisation’s’ ability to deliver value? Where should you start? How do you make the difference?

We have previously shared our insight on the tool we use to focus and motivate teams to deliver value, “the Personal Measurement Framework” – see connecting to value . However, whilst the tool can and does make a difference; through the conversations it prompts and the actions that result. However, our insight is that there is something more fundamental that has to be addressed to provide the fertile ground for such tools to work.

The fundamental thing seems to be the senior executive team sharing a deep, comprehensive, non-transactional view of how digital technology works for their customers, their teams and the organisation’s stakeholders . The senior team understand the specific benefits that digital investments can deliver and the critical success factors in the delivery of benefits.

And in our experience, the foundation for that deep understanding is the CIO and their team investing time and emotion into the set of powerful connections, engagements and relationships with their colleagues both inside and outside the organisation. And the first step is to establish those relationships and importantly to never stop developing them – it’s a critical part of your work. In our view, it is the foundation for the delivery of value from investment in digital technology.

In building, developing and sustaining those critical relationships, the important steps, include:

Focus, identify the key players for the delivery of value through a stakeholder analysis process;
Invest, take time to understand what value means for each of your c-level colleagues and beyond that for customers, for your board, shareholders, make explicit the value statements and the evidence that will be used to demonstrate value delivery;
Challenge, identify and address the difficult questions, confront those questions with data, engage in constructive debate with colleagues to deepen the mutual understanding;
Deliver, take action, lead your team through delivery of changes at the appropriate frequency – anything from by the minute and the hour through to more traditional weekly or monthly reviews;
Don’t stop, developing these foundational relationships should not stop, it is work, it may not feel like it when you start, but in our experience it is the source of value delivery.

And in telling stories about what you do, in the language you use, putting value creation “front and centre” matters. As CIOs you have the platform of your enterprise view and awareness of the change agenda, you are extremely well placed to enable decision making based on value. As CIO, you understand value and know how your organisation can deliver. Enable your organisation make the right technology investments to deliver long term productivity gain.

Connecting to Value

Alistair Russell · November 25, 2021 · Leave a Comment

In our experience, focusing and motivating your teams to deliver value for your organisation remains one of the most considered challenges for leaders. Especially doing it in a way that works. In a way that is both efficient and effective. We know that sustaining teams and individuals to do the right thing is critically important and yet it remains hard work for us all. This challenge is heightened in our context of enabling clients to deliver value through the power of digital technologies. In our dynamic and developing contexts, we continue to work at making sense of which managerial and leadership approaches and tools will deliver the right outputs, let alone make sure that the outputs do really enable the value desired.

Addressing this challenge is made more complex in many of our client organisations because teams and individuals are typically ‘citizens’ of many units. Units that have a digital product or service focus, units that have a strategic business focus, units that have a professional focus such as programme and project management, business analysis, quality assurance, user experience etc.. We find that now more than ever, generic objective, KPI driven models rarely deliver for the individual, team or indeed the organisation. Sometimes such models can even work against the delivery of true shareholder or stakeholder value.

In response to this enduring challenge we developed an approach – the “Personal Measurement Framework”. We have used this successfully many times with clients, guided by three important axioms. Firstly, to design an approach that connects with value as perceived by the relevant stakeholders, connects to why your role, your team and your capability exists. Secondly, to provide structure and framework, yet empower individuals to develop their own measurement framework and thirdly, to balance the measurement framework across the full range of measures, not just on the traditional metric of output delivery.

The Personal Measurement Framework starts with the idea of a value proposition from the Business Model Canvas – see Business Model Generation. The process invites leaders and teams to teams to start with ‘end in mind’, to start with the job that their ‘customer’ or indeed their customers’ customer is responsible for delivery and what are the pains and gains for them in delivery of that job. Then the process gets the leaders and teams to make explicit the value proposition of their product or service in terms of the pain relievers and gain creators that they deliver. If appropriate you can add in a step of using the value proposition to structure and engagement with ‘customer’ or agent of ‘customer’ to validate the value proposition.

The next step is to use the gain creators and pain relievers identified in the value proposition to develop measures of delivery of value. And to develop measures through challenging leaders and teams to hold onto the tenets of Kaplan and Norton’s work on balanced scorecards – see Harvard Business Review article. Developing measures that don’t just measure output e.g. tested and integrated code, but also measure development of capability and learning e.g. codified process improvement alongside measures that are meaningful for the customer e.g. transaction speed, volume growth.

The Personal Measurement Framework delivers benefits through explicitly connecting your teams to value delivery with additional benefits delivered through the process that builds ownership and commitment leading to increased effectiveness and efficiency. As with all ideas and models our Personal Measurement Framework is only as good as the leadership that assures implementation, learning and development. And when deployed fully, with appropriate support and collaborative coaching amongst the team the Framework can and does deliver sustained value.

References:

Business Model Generation: Osterwalder and Pigneur, Wiley 2010

The Balanced Business Scorecard, Kaplan and Norton, Harvard Business Review 1992