09.02.10
Heads Down or Heads Off
[Cartoon]
This is a very difficult time for Enterprise Architects that look to the future. Tough times for existing organizations require everyone to stay heads-down with little or no attention given to the future. It is all about survival.
During these times, Enterprise Architects drift back into the roles of Solution Architect and Infrastructure Architect. The central IT guys like this, because these are the roles that IT understands. This lets IT rule the information technology environment without having any Enterprise Architects hamper them with resource or service sharing.
The Enterprise Architect believes that the ends do not justify the means. The means should always be evaluated within the scope of the entire enterprise with the purpose of enhancing the total organization. This is a great viewpoint, but when an organization believes that it is just trying to survive, the ends may often outweigh the means.
When the ends begin to outweigh the means, the Enterprise Architect has lost the argument. But the enterprise has lost even more. The short steps of survival may become the staircase of poor decisions that eventually lead the organization to the end they were trying so hard to avoid.
This happens when things begin to turn around and the organization realizes that it must clean up some of the mess it made in order to compete in the future. This is summed up in statements like, “We are reinventing ourselves.”
Competition for these “reinventing” organizations often comes from smaller organizations that can adjust to the means that will bring support to the current environment and lead them into the future. Competition will also come from startup organizations that are not bound to the “quick and dirty” means used by the older organizations to reach their short-term ends.
My recommendation is that Enterprise Architects do what is necessary to survive, but do not abandon the models. Do what is necessary to keep the models current during tough times. These models will be of great value when the organization begins to come out of survival-mode. The Enterprise Architect can show the gap between the current state and the newly defined future state. This is just what Enterprise Architecture is about.
Enterprise Architects are well-aware of the continuing evolution of technology. They creatively look for technology convergence that can provide breakthroughs in thinking. We are at one of those convergent junctions today. What is about to happen will give non-professional information technologists control of their use of automation in their business. No longer will they simply peer through windows and see only what applications let them see. They will be able to go inside, see how things work, and control their automation. – Enterprise Architects Masters of the Unseen City
Closing the Business / IT gap.
