This article is intended as a means to share a perspective and help those working towards enabling agility throughout an organisation to understand where it should start and how it could be facilitated by Enterprise Architecture.
Businesses are trying hard to become more responsive to react to competition, regulation, external market forces and internal challenges. However, the way they are going about this is somewhat interesting.
In many cases they are mistaking business agility with agile software development, DevOps etc which are all software development methodologies and IT service management constructs but these are two very different things. So do they really know what agility means?
- Recommended Reading The Secret History of Agile Innovation
The business needs to think about business agility in terms of the dynamics of the business strategy mapping their vision, goals, strategy, tactics and business capabilities. They need to think about where change needs to be targeted and where investment needs to be maintained then be able to clearly communicate that to the wider organisation.
Strategy should be clearly defined along with appropriate tactics which will enable the execution to be agile in areas where radical change is required. Examples of such tactics can be reducing bureaucracy and constraints, enabling fluidity to be able to adapt to new business models quickly or preparing for various business scenarios so they can deliver change proactively.
The benefits of targeted agility will enable the business to react to change in market conditions, regulations, external/internal changes, and the customer environment. More importantly it can enable a positive change in culture which could result in a cohesive way of working, innovation, incremental improvements to the value proposition or operations at a pace delivering tangible benefits and a competitive advantage.
There are several process models that businesses can adopt to enable business agility;
John Kotter’s 8-Step Process for Leading Change
- Recommended reading The Heart of Change
OODA (Observe – Orient – Decide – Action) Loop defined by John Boyd
- Recommended reading Coming Full Circle with Boyds OODA Loop Ideas: An analysis of innovation diffusion and evolution
Once the business has adopted the notion of agility, this concept then needs to be clearly communicated and cascaded across all other functions that support the planning, change, software development and IT service management of an organisation. In many cases this can result in organisational change to enable quicker decision making and change.
This is where enterprise architecture can help, it can enable the business to gain agility by helping the business understand the impact of change quickly and how it should be directed, help in the strategic change and investment planning process, provide just enough governance to ensure strategic alignment ensuring the desired business outcomes are being delivered, deeply embed itself in the delivery and support process and increase flexibility by defining an architecture which is not rigid and more adaptive.
However, the Enterprise Architecture function itself needs to become more responsive to work the business, it needs to evaluate its current scope and mandate, ways of working, its capabilities and skills, its charter and principles, etc. to assess suitability to facilitate business agility. This could result in organisational and governance model change, introduce new architecture capabilities like product architecture, could result in changing the mandate for different parts of architecture, etc.
Ultimately though it means that Enterprise Architecture must be able to think differently when required, so not just about the requirements of today but also those that could occur in the future. Not just about governance but think about enablement.
The Enterprise Architecture function must fundamentally change its relationship with the business and those working in delivering business solutions. It must be seen to be an enabler, not a blocker for the business and for those who are working towards a common set of goals. It needs to become an intrinsic part of defining and delivering the business vision and desired business outcomes.
- Recommended reading This TOGAF Leader’s Guide is written directly for the person who is tasked with developing, sustaining, and evolving an EA Capability that delivers what their enterprise needs.
- Recommended reading A practitioners guide to developing enterprise architecture following the TOGAF ADM. This guide puts forward an approach to develop, maintain, and use an Enterprise Architecture that aligns to a set of requirements and expectations of the stakeholders and enables predictable value creation.
