Week 1: The Foundations
Reading through week 1 assignment and chapter I of the text book, I couldn't help but think of how lucky I have been in my career and how intuitive life analogies apply to work dynamics and business processes.
I have been lucky in my career to work mainly with growing technology companies applying, for the most, the latest agile and best practices in running the business and the organization units. So having a solid foundation to build strategy and an operating business model has always felt as if it goes without saying. The examples provided in illustrating the importance of a good foundation to execute strategy remind me of several clients I had dealt with during implementation phases of projects as professional services work: bringing advanced software solutions to business needs in ever changing landscape of technology and business processes. Some of these projects were successful in delivery and in results; others were painful exercises of introducing new tools to a land-mine field of complex and intricate silos of units and teams. In every successful project, the client had a good foundation for execution.
Life analogies always force themselves in common every day activities whether one is addressing a coding problem, integrating systems, analyzing data, or solving a business problem. The same way one needs foundations for learning a language, a tool, a human activity, the same way an organization has to have foundation for running its business. I was reading the example of walking and running (you need to walk before learning to run) and couldn't help but think of how in EA 871 where the basics of Enterprise Architecture described having the artifacts and components as crucial to successful EA. It is intuitive from life to have components and tools that you can leverage to use to solve or build even though they were not meant specific for that purpose (a far extreme example is using a long screw driver as a stethoscope on a car engine). The dynamic essence of life forces the the skill of adaptation and not volume or strength to be at the highest of importance (that's how scientists say we beat the dinosaurs!), and the same principle applies to an organization: the better the foundation, tools and resources, the higher the competitive edge, business value and successful longevity it has.
Thanks for reading these rambling thoughts and I truly welcome thoughts and comments. If you have made it to this line, I leave you with this article that I found this week (" http://blogs.informatica.com/2015/10/02/state-enterprise-data-business-problem/#fbid=qcdGz5je-Qr ") which is a perfect introduction into why EA is on the top list of my interests as it relates to data, analytics and cloud.
Anthony Brittingham Jr
ReplyDeleteAs I read your post, I couldn’t help but agree with your assessment in regards to the fundamental principles of Enterprise Architecture. It reminded me of my time in the United States Marine Corps and the mentality of work with what you have. However, this was probably the worst thing to do because it forced you to use a tool or a process and force it to do something it wasn’t intended for. In all fairness, it forces Marines to be adaptable in different situations but the process or tools are not repeatable. For a lot of businesses, they are still in the crawl state and it isn’t until they take their first step towards a repeatable process that they increase their revenues. Just look at all of the business mergers happening today. They noticed there was a process that they were not doing that the other company was already doing well. In short, Enterprise Architecture is helping a company that is currently crawling and helping them take their first step to running.