EA 872 Week 3 Where to Start

Assuming one has acceptance on an EA program, where do you go from there? You hear a lot on this topic. Some of the readings and recordings from this week reflect the "current state vs. future state" debate.  The presentation from Gartner  Research VP R. Scott Bittler "Enterprise Architecture Program Pitfalls- Current State First?" was focused on this topic and very thought provoking.

"Where do we start ?" is kind of like the "chicken or the egg" question. Which came first?  Where you start, in my view, does not matter if you do not have a  process to manage that change.  If our goal, via EA, is to deliver value early and often, we need to provide not only decision-making guidance but a deployment process to support that business decision.

Once again I am going to pull back the covers of my past for some practical experience. In my opinion, some of my biggest disasters I have been a part of are due to the inability of an organization to implement a  new process. As a consultant, I have found that once a process is defined and then agreed upon, it is the implementation process where the battle is won.  A project can rapidly go off track if the organization does not have a process in place to facilitate deployment quickly and efficiently.  We cannot deliver value "often" if the deployment process does not work right. It is like designing an emissions-free vehicle that everyone wants to buy, but you cannot get out the door to the market. No matter how great everyone thinks something is, people lose trust when one is unable to deliver.

In my business, we found we needed to build a strong team, establish guiding principles, and adopt a shared environment (people, process, and tools) when deploying new solutions for our clients. This became more critical than what they were currently doing or how they wanted to evolve their processes and supporting solutions. Once a delivery framework is established, these principles and methods can be applied to individual business unit initiatives and projects across the enterprise. The role of EA is to facilitate the movement from current to future state. That change is managed by adopting a common delivery framework and supporting toolkit. This, in turn, tends to reduce complexity and provides a means to deal with the diversity inherent in most business units. This  framework provides the ability to respond to changing business needs rapidly and efficiently.

So back to the debate...what comes first? Mr. Bittler goes on to talk about doing the current and future state in parallel and the pitfalls of one approach vs. the other.  To manage any of this, one would need to provide change management in a quick and dynamic way that allows for all types of changes. Incremental and radical changes will need to be managed at different times and across business units.

I believe the real starting point is having your delivery framework and management process established. Once you have that, it is "game on" in my opinion!

Thanks again for reading! What are your thoughts and experience?