Considering that the general domain for this blog, as its name implies, is the evolution of the enterprise IT organization towards the year 2017 (10 years from when I started this blog), Google’s announcement of its planned Chrome OS is, I believe, a very big deal – or, at least, will prove to be over the next 3 to 5 years.

Most of my consulting clients have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft in general, and Windows in particular.  Microsoft takes an increasingly significant bite out of the IT budget, and the cost of resources needed to keep PC’s running and secure is a substantial burden on enterprise IT organizations – one they they get little to no credit for.  (As I’ve noted before, IT infrastructure activities such as keeping PC’s running are only visible when they fail!)

Overshooting User Requirements

Clayton Christensen, in his classic book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail” points out that over time, through a successive series of minor innovations, products tend to overshoot a their performance needs beyond which the typical user can absorb.  (How much of Windows do you really need and use?  How many features of MS Office go unused by all but the hardiest of users?)  This overshooting of product capabilities leaves great openings for new market entrants to come in well below current performance thresholds with products that fully meet the needs of the typical user, without the encumbrances of the bells and whistles – often derisively referred to as “bloatware.”  That is the play being made successfully today with Netbooks.  That is also the play, I believe, Google made previously with Google Apps, and is now making with Chrome OS.  But in the latter case, its not just a stripped down OS (with the speed and simplicity benefits that brings), but an OS designed from the outset for a Web-based universe.

Inevitably, not everyone believes Chrome OS will be a slam dunk for Google.  (See for example, David Coursey’s Tech Inciter blog at PC World – Five Reasons Google Chrome OS Will Fail.)  I personally don’t buy David’s arguments – they mostly seem to be relative to today’s marketplace.   I believe the enterprise market will be more than ready for such an innovation by the time it really hits the marketplace, and that Google Chrome OS represents the first real threat to Microsoft hegemony over the desktop.  It’s also interesting to note that in the same week Google made this announcement, they also removed the “beta” designation from Google Mail (a beta that was 5 years in the making!)

What do you think?  Are you likely to switch from Windows if Chrome OS delivers against its promises?

My company, nGenera has just launched a new multi-company research project into success and failure factors for Web 2.0.   As part of this research, we are gathering data and experiences on employee use of Web 2.0 tools on the job.

If you have been following, or trying to promote or manage, the use of Web 2.0 tools for business purposes in your organization, please click on the link below to the survey and let us know about those experiences. We do ask for the name and the organization of the individual submitting the survey; otherwise, questions, most of which call for open-ended responses, are optional.  All responses are kept confidential.

Thanks in advance to all who participate. If you include your contact details in the survey, we will send you a full copy of the completed research report when the research is completed.

Survey link.

I’ve recently been asked a couple of questions I used to hear all the time.    The questions are:

1. Doesn’t process discipline add overhead and cost?
2. Doesn’t process discipline stifle creativity?

I thought these questions had been put to rest years ago, but I guess they are still out there floating around in the air.

When Does Process Discipline Make Sense?

Not everything lends itself to process discipline, or to the same degree and rigor.  Back in September 2008, I posted Part 2 to my IT Organization Design series.

In that post, I drew on some theoretical work by Henry Mintzberg that my colleague Roy Youngman and I have been drawing from over many years in our consulting work.  Mintzberg’s Theory on Organizational Forms discusses four “standardization” strategies that can be applied in organizational design:

• Standardization of work processes, which achieves coordination by specifying the work processes of people carrying out interrelated tasks. This is the common model for things that are routine and sequential (e.g., IT operations, data center, telecommunications, IT infrastructure, etc.)
• Standardization of outputs, which achieves coordination by specifying the results of different work. This is the best model for things that are collaborative and perhaps visual. This is perhaps the dominant model for systems development and programming.
• Standardization of skills (as well as knowledge), in which different work is coordinated by virtue of the related training the workers have received. This is the model for things that are complex and exploratory. There is an element of this in all IT roles, but tends to apply mostly in the more technical and operational roles (think Microsoft Certification programs, Project Management Institute, etc.)
• Standardization of norms, in which it is the norms infusing the work that are controlled, usually for the entire organization, so that everyone functions according to the same set of beliefs. I’ve found over the years that IT groups with the most cohesive culture (i.e., they have a shared sense of their destiny, and a passion for fulfilling it) are the most effective in driving performance and leading transformations. For example, at their best, movements such as Total Quality Management and 6 Sigma instill norms of quality management. I’ve also found (though this is unfortunately not the norm) values initiatives such as Johnson & Johnson’s Credo Values, and Google’s Mission to be effective ways to motivate and focus people around important values and norms.

So, process discipline makes the most sense for activities that are routine and sequential – not coincidentally, this is the domain of ITIL v3, as well as the focus for most Lean and 6 Sigma programs.  Note that systems development lends itself better to standardization of outputs, which is what most systems development methodologies achieve.  Disciplines such as Business-IT Relationship Management lend themselves better to standardization of skills – people with the right competencies who know the business, are innovative, good communicators, and so on.  While such roles can be well served by an account management process, for example, the real key is in their knowledge and behaviors.

When Does Process Discipline Add Overhead and Cost?

Now, back to our opening questions.  As long as process discipline is applied to a domain that warrants it – i.e., requires the coordination of multiple people carrying out interrelated tasks that are routine and sequential, I would argue (and the quality literature and research support) that the benefits of consistent, efficient and lean processes save cost and reduce overhead.  This was the intent behind Phillip Crosby’s book title, Quality is Free.  It’s not actually “free” but a high quality process always ultimately costs less than a low quality one.  As the saying goes, “There’s never time to do it right, but always time to do it over!”

When Does Process Discipline Stifle Creativity?

When I think about this question, I’m reminded of my former colleague Tom Davenport, who was fond of saying, “Process will set you free!”  And I absolutely believe that.  However, it is not automatically or universally so.  As a (very) amateur musician, I have to know the context in which I’m playing when performing with others.  Are we performing a set of defined and familiar classics?  Or are we jamming?  Or are we improvising in more of a jazz sensibility?  For the familiar classics, we’d better stick to the score, play what we practiced, and any deviations (i.e., creativity) better be very skillfully executed or they will sound like mistakes.  If jamming, we probably have an underlying structure, e.g., key, time signature, verse/chorus/verse/bridge (i.e., process) that we will follow, but room to be creative around that process.  If we are playing jazz, then we may have little to no structure, and had better be very talented musicians!

Note here, context is everything, and a decent musician knows when he’s performing a standard, jamming, or creating something new.  I think some of the most insightful work on process discipline, creativity and context came from Joseph Juran many years ago in his classic text Managerial Breakthrough.  Juran argued that you can manage for control (process discipline, incremental and continuous improvement) or you can manage for breakthrough performance (step change, creativity, process reengineering).  He further argues that each require different organization and management approaches, and you had better be clear on which you need and are trying to achieve – control or breakthrough, and then ensure you are managing and motivating appropriately.

So, I believe that process discipline, applied blindly, can indeed stifle creativity – as Juran would say, “prevent bad change.”  Know where you need creativity, and where you don’t, and where the nature of the work lends itself to excellent processes, follow a strong process discipline.  That will ultimately free up resources and management bandwidth to work on those activites where creativity is appropriate – where you are trying to “create good change”.

Picture courtesy of “Our Name Is Blog“

As a US taxpayer, Information Technology professional, and one who feels that healthcare spending is waaaay too high and increasing too rapidly, I have high hopes for the latest push on healthcare IT.  High hopes, but, frankly, tempered expectations!

Process Literacy and Automation

Marketplace business competition is a wonderful thing.  It forces operational excellence – to beat your competitors, you have to have the highest quality, lowest cost ways of providing your product or service.  This competitive pressure has led companies, industry by industry, to reengineer their business processes.  Manufacturing, discount retail, high technology, financial services – all stepped up to the reengineering challenge over the last 10 to 15 years.  In some cases, it was a strategic preemptive strike designed for a major competitive advantage – think WalMart and its supply chain initiative, or Federal Express and its reinvention of overnight package delivery.  In other cases, it was a response to someone else’s first move – think the US auto industry response to Japan, Inc. in general, and Toyota in particular (In retrospect, too little, too late?)

The point is that throughout industry and commerce, across the globe, competition has forced process discipline.  It was not just that these companies reengineered their major business processes – they also institutionalized “process thinking.”  They manage their work through end-to-end processes (e.g., order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, hire-to-retire, supply chain), and have a culture of continuous process improvement.  They are lean, cost-effective and agile – these were perhaps the most valuable legacies of the reengineering movement.  They busted silos (see my recent post on Bustin’ Silos With The Role Bomb!), established metrics that drive improvement, flattened their organizations, and engaged their entire workforce (and suppliers and customers) in the relentless push for continuous process  improvement.

Many Healthcare Institutions Lack Process Discipline

And there’s the rub!  While industry and commerce have either jumped into process management, or been dragged into it by their competition, most healthcare institutions have not traditionally focused on end-to-end process management.  Within silos, you will often find good processes, and, to be clear, most institutions are staffed by highly trained and dedicated professionals who do an excellent job providing healthcare.  However, they have not had to tackle the kind of cross-functional reengineering that competitive industries have been dealing with for a decade or more, and that are necessary for deploying and gaining benefits from Electronic Health Records.

And yet, with Electronic Health Records and the US government’s $17 billion stimulus package for doctors and hospitals that adopt EHRs, processes will have to be reengineered (and then continuously improved).  And this has to be done against a highly accelerated timeframe.  And that’s what worries me the most.

How Long Does it Take to Master Process Discipline?

From my experience and based on many enterprise system research projects I’ve been part of, most enterprise reengineering efforts take about 3 years of “heavy lifting” and about another 2 years to “settle down” and really start to deliver their benefits.  Many health care institutions are on a much faster fuse than that – I hope they make it!

Is There a Fast Path to Healthcare IT?

In industry, some viable alternatives to wholesale process reengineering and ERP deployments surfaced about half-way through the primary reengineering era (say 1990 to 2005).  These included business process outsourcing.  Companies from American Express to BP outsourced their “back office” processes.  And it was not just back-office processes that were outsourced.  Companies such as Solectron (now part of Flextronics) and Flextronics took over electonic design, manufacturing and logistics services from many household names in electronics, freeing them to focus on sales and marketing.

Perhaps we will see similar moves in the heathcare industry.  In fact, earlier this year I posted on The Wal-Martification of Healthcare IT and one particular initiative targeted at small physician groups.  This may just be the beginning of a major restructuring of the healthcare industry.

I’ve been posting on and off about Cloud Computing since I began this blog a couple of years ago.  But, as one who spends most of his time with IT leaders of large global enterprises, sometimes the promise of the Cloud seems more like a mirage!

I’ve Looked At Clouds From Both Sides Now

Back in August 2008, not being able to resist the title to the wonderful Joni Mitchell and her reference to “cloud illusions I recall”, I posted on the denial I was witnessing among my client base.   I likened it to the denial that was common among CIO’s back in the early 1980’s.  To quote from that post:

(CIO’s) were mostly in denial, even as executive offices just down the corridor from the CIO’s office were beginning to become home to a variety of rogue PC’s – machines such as Apple II’s and Radio Shack TRS 80’s.

Fast forward 25 years or so. Now the press is full of predictions and prognostications about Cloud Computing, several key players are investing heavily in this space (pun intended) but many CIO’s and CTO’s either just don’t believe it, see it as warmed over service bureau computing from the 60’s and 70’s, or believe it’s the greatest threat to enterprise computing sanity since computer viruses first appeared.

Now, nearly 1 year later, I’m still seeing the same denial – Cloud Computing, for the most part, is on the back burner – a technology to watch!  Clearly, there are significant risks with the untried, standards are still evolving, and there’s something intimidating about such a simple concept being able to replace so much enterprise technology and expertise – the “heart and soul” of the typical IT organization.  In fact, for many IT shops, this “heart and soul” is where they’ve invested many of their improvement efforts over the last few years, implementing ITIL and process improvement approaches.  That’s been a hard-won fight, and CIO’s are loathe to admit that there might now be an easier and better way!

In another post earlier this year on The Dangers of Cloudy Thinking, I wrote:

I’m fascinated and bemused by this Cloud Computing phenomenon. Never before have I had such a strong feeling that something really, really important is happening – a fundamental discontinuity, if you will, in the way we leverage IT – and yet most of my clients and those I am interacting with in a couple of multi-company research projects are essentially standing on the sidelines.

Hincliffe’s “8 Ways That Cloud Computing Will Change Business”

Dion hits the nail on the head once more with his excellent June 5 post in which He says:

(Cloud computing offers) benefits that can potentially change the game for many firms that are willing to be very proactive in managing potential downside. These include access to completely different levels of scale and economics… Easier change management of infrastructure including maintenance and upgrades (cloud vendors extensively virtualize and commoditize the underlying components to make them non-disruptive to replace and improve) … Cloud computing also offers an onramp to new computing advances such as non-relational databases, new languages, and frameworks that are designed to encourage scalability and take advantage of new innovations such as modern Web identity, open supply chains, and other advances.

He goes on to show the major pros and cons, and then to cite 8 compelling ways that cloud computing can change business.

Cloud Computing – Ideal for the “Edgy” Opportunities?

Dion refers to the use of cloud computing beyond “edge” computing (which he describes as minor applications and non-critical business systems).  This is the only place where I take issue – I think “edge” computing is where the exciting action is, where the high value and innovative opportunities lie.

Back in July 2008, I posted on “Edginess and Innovation.”  In that post, I differentiated between “core” and “edge”:

Many IT leaders when talking about the “core” are referring to the “legacy” systems…  built over the years and have to maintain.  But in reality, the core goes much deeper than the systems and technologies. Business processes – especially when you include the unautomated practices and workflows that interact with the automated ones, are hard to change. The mindsets that dominate “core” thinking and “edge” thinking are radically different. I’ve noted before that quality guru Joseph Juran distinguished between “preventing bad change” (keeping processes under statistical control” and “creating good change” (innovating processes and products, or creating “breakthrough” performance as Juran put it) and the different management approaches and structures each requires. Most IT leaders have focused for years on management approaches more consistent with preventing bad change than creating good change. This has created a mindset that abhors risk taking.

I believe most of the “core” opportunities have been addressed in the typical global enterprise.  Sure, there’s always more to do (and the trap of saying “yes” to all the business requests to continually tweak and bolt onto core systems) but I believe you can move the business value needle significantly to the right by tackling more of the “edge” opportunities, and that is where, to Dion’s point, the Cloud (and its related technologies) offers real promise – now!

The idea that government can benefit from Web 2.0 and all its implications is exciting, to say the least.  The notion that government, though technology, can become a “platform” for its citizens, is an incredibly compelling idea who’s time has come.

I’m highly sensitized to this movement towards Government 2.0 for at least three reasons:

1. My company has a very active research program called Government 2.0 – Wikinomics, Government and Democracy, and we are increasingly working in this space.
2. The US now has our first ever CIO, Vivek Kundra, who last week urged the use of Web 2.0 approaches to address the needs of government.
3. I’m a US federal, state and county taxpayer who often feels like he’s getting relatively poor return on his taxes!

Government as a Platform

Last year, my company completed research on Platforms for Business Growth.  This project defined a platform as:

A set of assets whose roles and connections are defined so that they can be configured in a variety of useful ways.

Platform thinking is fundamentally about defining and publishing the specifications and ground rules for what assets do and how they connect. And the power of a platform grows as it incorporates more assets.  When you publish your platform externally – to customers, suppliers, other business partners, and, in the case of Government 2.0, to your citizens and taxpayers, they have better means of collaborating with you.  Your assets and platforms become extensions of theirs and vice versa.  Think of all the information locked in government data bases, and the implications of opening up API’s (with due regard to privacy and security), and getting all this information into hands that need it and can use it?  Progress has already been made by many agencies with self-service driver licenses and so forth.  These services save the government money, increase responsiveness, empower the citizens and generally improve satisfaction with government services.  Imagine where this could go in the future?

Dion Hinchliffe on Building a Vision for Government 2.0

With that said, I can do no better than point you to this insightful post from the ever enlightening Dion Hinchcliffe.  I consider this to be a landmark post – mandatory reading for anyone who’s ever paid taxes and/or is interested in the potential for and implications of Web 2.0 to the world of government and commerce – beyond simple social networking, and knowing that “Amy is running before breakfast” as one of the first messages to me that came up on Facebook said this morning!

Graphic courtesy of Public Org Theory

I was working with a client that was experiencing significant pain trying to implement a major enterprise system.  One of the recurring issues was around the boundaries of responsibility between business operations groups and IT.  With the new enterprise software, which offered extensive user-configurable capabilities, who should be responsible for what?

Who’s On First?

Business operations wanted the maximum flexibility implied by the enterprise software package, while IT was mostly concerned about “control” and protecting the users from doing something in the name of “configuration” that might damage the integrity of the system or its data.  I suggested an intervention where we would move beyond territorial issues to collaboratively build the process that would be used to manage configuration changes.  The process would point to “roles” that in turn would identify “competencies” needed to fill given roles.

My suggested intervention did not get very far!  It turned out that the term “roles” had a very different meeting at this client – one that was 180 degrees reversed from what I was intending, and from what I have found to be the common interpretation of the “role” concept.

You Say Role, I hear Job

Wikipedia defines role as a “set of connected behaviors, rights and obligations as conceptualized by actors in a social situation.”  In the organizational (rather than social) setting, the concept of role has been important to decoupling the rigid characteristics of “job” from “organization”.  Roles, when properly implemented, offer certain advantages compared with other organization design constructs.  Roles allow organizations to increase flexibility and agility as individuals can take on multiple roles to suit the need at a given time under certain conditions, regardless of formal “job description” or position on an organization chart.

Roles can be achieved or ascribed.  For example, many of us are familiar with the “power PC user” – the person in the office who is something of a PC jockey (or MS Office Jockey, or PowerPoint whiz).  This is the person you know to go to if you are trying to figure out how to do something.  They were not especially trained for this role, are not formally compensated for it, it is not in their formal job description, but they fill the role, and we are glad they do (and they are usually happy to do it!)  This is an example of an achieved role.

Similarly, some organizations do have the notion of the “power user” officially ascribed.  In this case, everyone knows that Mary is the ERP power user – if you have questions or a problem doing your job through the ERP, Mary is your first point of contact.  She has been trained, ERP support is part of her job, and she may be able to answer your question, or if not, knows who to go to for the answer.

Professional consulting organizations are very familiar with roles.  On engagement “A” I might be the Client Relationship Officer, responsible for the overall client satisfaction and quality assurance for the engagement.  On engagement “B” I might be the Engagement Director, responsible for day-to-day project delivery.  On engagement “C” I might have more of a cameo role as a subject matter expert in Enterprise Architecture.  And while I am Client Relationship Officer on one engagement, Engagement Director on another engagement, Subject Matter expert on yet another, I might also fill the role of Research Director on a multi-company research project.

This type of “role” structuring create flexibility and increases the ability for people to work across silos.  My competency footprint, and my ability to fill a range of different roles now become the key indicators of my value and worth, rather than my “seniority” and the number of people I have working for me.

Breaking down the silos

So, if you are trying to transform to a more agile, flatter organization, with increased agility and improved collaboration across traditional organizational boundaries, think about how you can decouple rigid job structures from the individuals that fill them.  Think about using the notion of “role” with people taking on multiple roles to suit the circumstances.

Roles fit in well with the shift from vertical to horizontal management, and to process-centricity.  Roles fit particularly well in the context of Web 2.0, and the shift to Enterprise 2.0.   Processes call out roles needed to execute them; roles prescribe competencies (knowledge, skills and behaviors) which people must demonstrate to fill a given role, and all of this works regardless of who you “report to,” who “reports to you,” and where you are on the dreaded organizational chart.  As we move from positions in organization charts to collaboration across silos, the concept of roles as a unit of analysis for work understanding and design becomes an important tool.

Photo from ‘‘Beetlejuice’’ (1988) courtesy of Boston.com

There are many reasons to rant in this world – customer service is often not what it needs to be, and sometimes getting simple things done takes way more effort and is far more frustrating than should be the case.  As a blogger, I try to resist the temptation to use my blog as a venting platform, but every now and again I find myself getting so steamed, I have to rant!

I feel some justification in this case.  It was exactly 1 year ago today that I extolled the virtues of AT&T’s U-Verse service, and exactly 1 month later that I reported my first glitches, which were a result of AT&T’s lack of integrated billing.  This lack of integration (1 year later, no less!!!) bit me again and cost me hours on a phone being routed from person to person in AT&T trying to achieve a very basic need.  My company is moving some voicemail servers, so I needed to change the phone number that my office line call forwards to on busy or no answer.  Simple, right?  You’d think so.  I assumed this could be done on line (which it was for my wireless service) but for the land line that was not the case.  Note, my land line is not on U-Verse, but AT&T seems to have a hard time figuring that out.  It has literally taken me 3 weeks to reach the right person to make this change – a time-frame exacerbated by the fact that I travel and there are fairly narrow windows when I can spend time making this type of service request.

It all came to a head yesterday when I eventually reached a service tech who took all the details, then figured out (what I had told him at the start of the call) that I was referring to a land line.  “I’m sorry, I can’t help you with this, but I can pass you on to the person that can.”  I quickly objected, telling the service rep that I’d been down this path several times, and was either passed on to a line that was (a) never answered, or (b) rang twice then dropped, or (c) was another rep in the same department who was equally unable to help me.  He assured me that he would get me to the right person.  I was put on hold, and… you guessed it, found myself in the same U-Verse hole I’d started in!

Eventually, I did get to the right department, and the requested change to my call forwarding number has been made.  I’m sure the folk inside AT&T are thinking, “What’s the big deal, landlines, wireless and U-Verse are separate organizations with separate systems?”  But from my perspective, part of the AT&T value proposition is a single provider supposedly creating an integrated, uniform and satisfying customer experience.  Nothing could be further from the truth!  Three different web-sites, different billing systems, different support systems, and zero appreciation or concern for the customer experience.

What sort of experiences do you create for your customers?  Does the customer experience you create keep them loyal, happy and expanding their relationship with you?  Or, like me, are they ‘running for the door’ and actively looking for an alternate provider who will deliver on the promise of their value proposition?

I actually credit the topic of this post to a quote by a client last week.  We were working with him on the PMO he was setting up, when he made the point in the headline.  I thought it was provocative, and made an important point, so I want to explore it.

What Is Meant By Enterprise Architecture?

MIT Sloan School Professor Peter Weill defines Enterprise Architecture as “The organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of the firm’s operating model.”

There’s an important distinction I see between the contemporary discipline of Enterprise Architecture, and its more traditional roots in IT architecture.  The former tends to be driven by business model aspects, concerned with business processes and information.  As such, it tends to be “top down” and business or even ecosystem-centric, concerned with what is shared and common versus unique and differentiated.  The latter tends to be driven by the more technical aspects of IT infrastructure, concerned with models and standards around the technology components of IT infrastructure.  As such, it tends to be “bottom up” and “IT-centric.”  Ultimately, IT architecture is a level of detail within Enterprise Architecture, but is concerned with very different issues and stakeholders.

The Role of Enterprise Architect

According to Wikipedia, the role of enterprise architect is to “work with stakeholders, both leadership and subject matter experts, to build a holistic view of the organization’s strategy, processes, information, and information technology assets. The role of the Enterprise Architect is to take this knowledge and ensure that the business and IT are in alignment. The enterprise architect links the business mission, strategy, and processes of an organization to its IT strategy, and documents this using multiple architectural models or views that show how the current and future needs of an organization will be met in an efficient, sustainable, agile, and adaptable manner.”  Wikipedia goes on to say, “Enterprise architects operate across organizational and computing “silos” to drive common approaches and expose information assets and processes across the enterprise. Their goal is to deliver an architecture that supports the most efficient and secure IT environment meeting a company’s business needs.”

So, What’s An IT Professional Good For?

To my recent post on “The Role of the IT Organization is Deeply Flawed“, Enterprise Architecture will become, I believe, a critical value-add for the IT profession.  With Web 2.0, the Internet becomes the computer.  While running the data centers and networks was an important IT organizational contribution in the pre-2.0 world, Web 2.0 (with its tools, cloud  computing, and software services) largely obsoletes this role.  While package installation, configuration and system development were crucial ingredients of the pre-2.0 world, mash-ups and end-user computing largely obsolete this role too.

So, what is left for the IT professional?  We must be the master enterprise architects, working with techniques such as strategy mapping and business-IT principles to integrate and differentiate across the business and ecosystem operating model.  We must be masters of functional decomposition, using rigorous techniques such as IDEF0 and SADT).  We must be the masters of  Metadata and  conceptual and logical data models.  We must be the keepers of the grand application blueprint and the interfaces between applications tracking events, messages and data flows.

As “computing” migrates away from the traditional IT organization and integrates into the business, enterprise architects will play the important role of ensuring a coherent whole – exposing services and providing integrating frameworks.  The specifics of the role are being discovered and defined over time, as technology evolves and as new tools and methods mature.

Enterprise Architecture Is Not For Everybody – A Personal Reflection

The conceptual skills for enterprise architects are not universally available.  Many current IT professionals will not make good architects, and would not be happy in an enterprise architect role.  Early in my own career, with experience as a child electronics hobbyist, repairing televisions for friends’ parents, and making tube (valve) guitar amplifiers, I got a degree in Electrical Engineering and took my first job as a computer hardware designer.  While I’d been at University, the vacuum tube had given way to the transistor and the first integrated circuits.  Suddenly my love of basic electronics was replaced by the need to be an architect.  Hardware design was an exercise in architecture, literally sitting all day at a drawing board laying out logic diagrams.  Once drawn, the only task that remained was to find the appropriate integrated circuits for each logic component (e.g., 8-way and-gate, 4-way exclusive-or gate, dual flip-flop) from a supplier’s manual, and to turn the whole thing into a circuit board layout.  Within 6 months, I left my job as a hardware design engineer, and moved into software engineering.  Now, some 40 years later, the software engineer is going the way of the hardware engineer!

The highly respected Dion Hinchliffe proclaimed late last week that we were in the midst of, “The Year of the Shift to Enterprise 2.0“   I don’t say “highly respected” lightly or with sarcastic intent.  I think Dion has done a fine job of helping us make sense of the whole 2.0 thing.  Also, this particular post cites several data sources of note, including Forrester, Deloitte, TMCnet and IntelliCom.  The data are compelling, although I believe they present a somewhat distorted view given they are largely driven by measurements of technologies rather than outcomes.

If We Provide It They Will Come…

It’s true – many large sites have SharePoint, and more are getting into IM and even blogs and wiki’s.  However, from my experience, much of this is experimental – some of it being deployed following an “if we provide it they will come” strategy.  There are false starts, and for many companies, I believe it will be another 12 months or so before Dion’s eye-catching ZDNet headline is truly deserved.

But, it is an encouraging picture.  It seemed like just a year ago that most large IT shops were actively trying to suppress tools such as IM and social networking.  Today, many are experimenting and some are well past the experiments and are driving real change – some of these with clear competitive impact.  Last week I was at my company’s Enterprise 2.0 research conference in Toronto, and it was clear from the participating member companies (from business and government, representing HR, Sales and Marketing and IT specialties) that their efforts are very real, and some quite mature.  This was not the lunatic fringe – this was business and government who have found new ways to work, to collaborate and to market.

What is your experience?  How real is Enterprise 2.0 at your company?  If not yet getting traction, why not?  What will it take?  Do you think this is all just hype, or do you believe the reality, as Dion claims, “a sea change in the way … businesses conduct collaboration and communication amongst their workers, and to a lesser extent the rest of the world”?