A Coherent Architecture as a Strategy

22 11 2009

There are several issues that influence the competitiveness of any organization.  These factors are to be found in any domain (and are almost generic). This means that the organization will lead to the innovation, growth and decline of organizations.
Some organizations are privileged by owning a monopoly either backed by a government or by the fact that their products or services are superior to any of the competitors on the market. This makes the organization rather good to earn money since they often can set the price for the products and services as they want to; however this also leads to lack of agility since the pressure of the free market isn’t influencing the decision making of the management or the employees.
When organizations growth then they have a tendency to become more bureaucratic since there is a greater need for coordinating among the members of the organization, departments and management. This leads to a great degree of standardization but it also leads to a decline in agility compared to changes in the domain of the organization.
Therefore it becomes a question on how to cope with the need for coordination (bureaucracy) and the need for agility.
This can become an influence that impacts the organization and if it is used correctly then the organization can gain a competitive advantage.
Likewise can the way the organization make use of a technology become a competitive advantage for the organization. An example of this is that the organization might be superior to any competitors to utilize their information technology like software and hardware to support and develop their processes. These processes might in return prove to become easier to handle and create more value than the processes the competitors of the organization have.
Organization culture might also prove to become a competitive advantage since it indoctrinates the employees to act in a specific way. If the organization culture makes the members of the organization find and discover errors and eliminate the errors then the cost of repair and service fall and re-enforce the brand of the organization and re-enforce the good will the customers of the organization has to the organization.
Thereto will coherency management assist the host organization with creating a competitive advantage since it will assist the management and the various other stakeholders in the organization developing the necessary overview and consistent information that can be used to make the proper decisions.
Thereto if IT, business processes, organization culture, corporate strategy aren’t aligned then the organization will experience that the system is not able to fulfill the its potential and will therefore the organization will experience opportunity costs.
It is therefore in the interest of the management to work with the organization to achieve its goals and it is in the interest of the employees to assist making their work place better for them. It is the interest of them to feel productive and feel that their work matters for the organization. It is therefore a paradigm to involve them in the decision making but they too should be kept informed on how the organization develops.
Coherency Management is building on the principles on identifying the underlying architecture in the organization and enhancing the development of the architecture and by that the organization.
This is done by applying the tools from Enterprise Architecture to identify and evaluate the various processes and adding the technology needed to enhance the processes or re-think the processes to generate more organizational value.
It is therefore a strategical tool to evaluate and rebuild the architecture of the organization to match those tasks and challenges the organization will face in the future competition. A solid architecture which can be extended and reused will be a necessity in the future so the organization can grow and develop an architecture that can be used to connect the processes, people, departments and organizations to develop the right products and services to the right price.

Organizations will in the future be able to align them self to one or more syndicates to create products which are cheap enough to sell to the people in the third world. The organizations in these  syndicates have to know their architecture to understand and connect to these shifting syndicates and if these organizations either don’t know or understand their architecture then they will not be able to join the syndicates and gain the benefits from it.

Therefore is it of strategic importance that all organization work with and articulate their architecture to enable abilities of agility, knowledge and innovation and to that all the support functions and processes to enable interactions with so called networked organizations and syndicates.

To give the analyst some insight into how IT influences the an Architecture then it is advised that the analyst reads about critical issues in IT management.


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Categories : Alignment, Discipline, Knowledge Management, Up in Time

Critical Issues in IT Management

19 11 2009

IT is a fundament when it comes to Coherency Architecture and it is therefore necessity to be able to understand the critical issues in IT management.

Therefore have I chosen to publish my notes from the course “Critical Issues in IT management” which I attended at Copenhagen Business School in year 2008.

As with all other documents at this blog the license for the document is Creative Commons V3 U.S. Edition share alike (read more under the general license for this blog).

Link to document: issuu.com

 

Enjoy the notes.

 


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Categories : Alignment, Business, Up in Time

The Coherency Architect

15 11 2009

Since the start of the blog then I have mentioned the work of the Coherency Architect. In this blog post I will describe what abilities the Coherency Architect should posses to perform his or her job. This description could be considered a template for a job description for the Coherency Architect.
The Coherency Architect has to be a generalist that have to understand the basis and depth of organizational behavior and understand human psychology in how the organization works.
The organization consists of various contexts which the Coherency Architect has to be able adjust to and develop suitable solutions for.
For being agile then the Coherency Architect has to understand and work by a set of principles based on an academic study of Management Accounting, Project Management, IT strategy, Corporate Strategy, Organizational studies, knowledge Management and change Management.
Some of the above mentioned disciplines are of course logical for a Coherency Architect to understand and to make use of; however some of the courses like Management accounting has to be understood otherwise the Coherency Architect wouldn’t be able to understand the economic flow or the cost structure of producing the products or the services in the organization.
The costs have to be understood to identify the bottle heads in the organization and it enable the Coherency Architect with the the tools needed to solve major problems for the organization.
Coherency Management and Coherency Architectures derives from field of Enterprise Architecture which originally was an engineering discipline for developing technical solutions for organizations. These technical solutions were derived from the IT strategy and the IT strategy was again derived from the Corporate Strategy. In that way IT and business had to be some how aligned to achieve sufficient results. This could be called Coherency in a simple state.
For this the understanding of business models, strategies and corporate strategies is needed and therefore should the Coherency Architect develop an understanding of these disciplines to be able to add value by changing the processes and adapting coherent processes.
For this the Coherency Architect should understand people (their psychology and their organizational abilities). The Coherency Architect should not get all his or her knowledge from the academic world but also gain knowledge from experience e.g., by working with people and developing his or her people skill and the Coherency Architect should be able to lead people into the new situation meaning that he or she has to understand rhetoric and leadership to inspire the members of the organization to help change instead of fighting change.
However people are often not good to stay focused on a goal that is distant in a matter of time frame and therefore should the Coherency Architect work on his or her motivation skills and to be able to create short term goals and short term wins that are aligned with a vision.
Especially the short term wins are important to keep commitment from the stakeholders in the organization.
The Coherency Architect has to understand how to operationalize programs for changing the organization and the be able to keep stakeholder commitment which is a classic project Management discipline.
It is vital to understand that the Coherency Architect has to be able to gain knowledge from both the academia and by gaining knowledge from working in practice in the organization. In some ways the a practical approach can be the proposal to align the processes so they are coherent.

Nonaka's SECI Model

Nonaka's Framework

Therefore should the organization that is about to apply for a Coherency Architect work with several perspectives on knowledge and not just be working with the idea that a pure academic would be able to solve the problems better than a person who only have practical education; however the middle ground would in most conditions be preferable.
The Coherency Architect and the organization have to adapt to each other otherwise Coherency Management can’t be applied properly.
The Management and the stakeholders of the organization have to invest their trust into the Coherency Architect to show to the rest of the host organization that the Coherency Architect has the power, the initiative and the right to give them orders to change the way they work.
It is often the failure of the Management to show commitment to the Coherency program that blocks for coherent changes in the host organization.
Since organization consists of humans then all organizations are alike and yet they aren’t. Therefore should the Coherency Architect also adapt to the organization.

The Mind Map below deals with the primary issues of the Coherency Architecture.

The Skills of the Coherency Architect

The Coherency Architect


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Categories : Business, Up in Time

The Layers of the Enterprise

6 11 2009

Coherency Management is build upon the idea that the system based on the idea that there are several layers in an organization. Layers that can vary from one another and that has to be aligned to make the organization to gain more (or simply work smarter).

Zachman (2005) has traditionally made use of his framework for changing these layers and he among others have established the platform for Enterprise Architecture; However the problem with the Zachman framework is that it can be identified as a method within the functionalist paradigm.

The functionalist paradigm (Burrell & Morgan, 1979) is known for its un-nuanced view on how people and systsems interact and can therefore by a threat (or a source of explanation) for why many IT related and organization related projects fail.

Doucet et al (2009) uses a view on the layers of the process which is based on Zachman’s framework which indicates a functionalist view of the organization. However it is notable that every organization has an architecture (the EA point of view) which indicates that there are several layers which the Coherency Architect has to work with to be able to propose coherent plans.

The first layer is the technical architecture. The technical layer consists of the servers, the computers and the network infrastructure that enables the applications to perform their tasks.

The second layer is the application architecture and is build upon the technical architecture. This layer deals with the applications (software) the organization make use of to provide the various business processes with the useable software. It is also the application that supports the transformation of data into information.

The third layer is the information architecture and is build upon the application architecture. The information architecture deals with how the data is archived, handled and maintained in the enterprise. This means that the layer contains the nerve of the enterprise. If the enterprise is not able to handle the information within it then it is likely the organization will go out of business. Information is gold in the time of the information economy.

The fourth layer is the business process architecture and is build upon the information architecture. The business processes can only be executed if the members of the organization who work with the particular processes are able to understand how the system work.

The fifth layer is the business architecture and is build on top of business process architecture.
The Business Architecture consist mainly of how the organization is designed e.g., the organization chart, the description of responsibilities and thereby who are accountable for what processes and what outcome of the various systems. It is obvious that this layer is depending on the layers beneath it like a pyramid.

Analysis Part

How can the Coherency Architect make use of the layers to implement coherency in the organization? The Coherency Architect has to view the organization as a system which in a way is fragmented and in another way can work independent of the each other. To make the an organization coherent in its decision making then the Coherency Architect has to uncover the various layers to identify potential elements that creates bottlenecks or other negative influence on the total architecture of the system works. The organization can of not be autonomous of its surroundings and therefore should impacts from the market, customers, technologies developed and supplied by suppliers be analyzed.

Any bottlenecks that have been identified have to be analyzed and a solution including a plan for implementation should be articulated and put into “the pipeline” (the pipeline is innovation related and will be handled in a future blog post).

When the organization is changing then the layers of the organization will be changing to and that will lead a need for a new analysis of the architecture of the organization.

It is therefore not a single project to implement Coherency Management. It should be understood as a continuous program to identify and develop the the Business Architecture and the underlying architectures.

The first obstacle the Coherency Architect will face when he or she will start the work on identifying the current layers and the general architecture of the organization will be that the documentation the organization has developed for themselves is outdated and the Coherency Architect has to go through all the four layers to create his or her own view on how the organization architecture is.

The Coherency Architect should therefore be prepared to invest a lot of the time of the first Coherency Project on investigating the layers and the general architecture of the organization and then keep updating his or her view on the situation during the entire project period.

Sources:

* Gary Doucet et al., Coherency Management: Architecting the Enterprise for Alignment, Agility and Assurance (International Enterprise Architecture Institute, 2009).

* Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan, “Sociological Paradigms and

Organisational Analysis – Elements of the Sociology of Corporate Life,” in (Heineman, 1979).


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