I thoroughly enjoyed the book Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, which she co-authored. It’s a recommended read for Enterprise Architects.
In the interview Jeanne Ross shares how Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Architects can help lead the way to successful business transformation.
Some key points from the interview:
“high performers in our sample of 102 companies, in fact, had greater architecture maturity.”
“there’s a cultural shift that takes place in an organization, when it commits to doing business in a new way, and that cultural shift starts with abandoning a culture of heroes and accepting a culture of discipline.”
“One thing you can’t get by spending more money is discipline, and architecture is very tightly related to discipline.”
“companies who were best at adopting architecture and implementing it effectively had cost pressures.” Cost pressures force a company to make tough decisions.
“companies are struggling more than we realized with using their platforms well.”
A message for Architects is you need to understand how effectively are people in your company adopt the capabilities and leverage them effectively? “the value add of the architecture is diminished by the fact that people don’t get it.” “It requires persistent coaching.”
“The best architects are listening very hard to who is asking for what kind of capability. When they see real demand and real leadership around certain enterprise capabilities, they focus their attention on addressing those, in the context of what they realize will be a bigger picture over time.”
Companies need to ensure their enterprise architecture does not constrain them but instead enables them. Effective Enterprise Architects can usually see the big picture even when the overall vision is not yet clear.
“What ends up happening instead is architects recognize key business leaders who understand the need for, reused standardization, process discipline, whatever it is.”
She’ll be sharing more insights at The Open Group conference in San Diego later this month.
