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.
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 Coherency Architect 