According to a Gartner survey presented at their EA summit in London the order of merit for the integration of EA into Business is:
1 Asia
2 South America
3 Europe
4 USA
It demonstrates that emerging economies and their developing organisations are more prepared to engineer and construct their businesses with help of the EA, than organisations in either the US or Europe.
I suspect that history is repeating itself – In the late 1970s Lean Manufacturing (Just in Time) had been developed by Toyota and had just been discovered by US businesses. Toyota, who had had a pressing need to catch up with the USA and Europe manufacturing, developed the processes originally started by Henry Ford.
In the face of competition from Japan in the 70s and 80s the US and Europe needed to catch up with Japan’s manufacturing methods and desperately copied the ideas emerging from Japan and from Toyota.
I predict that from 2013 and beyond, when the businesses in the USA and Europe realize that to compete with Asiapac and South American businesses – they too will have to re-architect and re-engineer their organisations and processes, just like in the 70s and 80s. This time it will be the business models and the business processes created by EA that will be re-exported to the US and Europe by the developing economies.
Calling all Enterprise Architects – are we ready for the challenge?
May 29, 2012 at 5:52 am
It’s always nice to see Gartner catching up
I have thought this for a long time and on that subjected posted the following to various LinkedIn Groups which you might find interesting…
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Demming and TQM vs Zachman (et al) and EA. Two sides of the same coin?
I firmly believe that when we are talking about EA we are essentially (should be) taking about taking the Architecture paradigm up the food chain (out of project land and IT and into management)
We are saying to the execs “There is a paradigm called architecture that is used of managing complexity and increasing the quality of decisions”
This is why the fundamentals of Demming are so applicable (if you think laterally) listen to anything Demming said and change the context from “The ford motor company dealing with the processes of producing cars” to “Any company dealing with the processes of change”
Demming and TQM
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Was all about the Quality of Production and applied to Operations.
Operational Quality and Efficiency.
Zachman and EA
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Is all about the Quality of Decisions and applied to Change.
Transformational Quality and Efficiency
I advocate that anyone involved in EA should adopt this approach for explaining EA in order to get organisations to adopt it.
Do you agree?
Is this the Standard Bearer that we can all unite behind as a profession and therefore make some massive steps forward in helping organisations and government to understand and adopt it.
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FYI I have posted a link to your post here, to those same groups.
May 29, 2012 at 11:36 am
I agree, EA provides the decision support tools and information to help to take better decisions. This is one of the descriptions of EA that I give to execs. Who would not want to take better decisions?
EA is also uniquely placed to enable the implementation of their strategies and direction, which is what the senior execs should be primarily concerned about.
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A major difficulty in the acceptance of EA is the perception of EA as being an IT centric discipline. It is, admittedly a leap of faith for non-IT staff to accept that something born out of IT has relevance outside of IT.
I think that the idea of architecting or designing an organisation to perform better, challenges the established view of the executives and board members, more than ever an MBA has done. Which is why, until the competition becomes unbearable; EA will have a hard time being accepted outside IT.
Of equal concern, is that IT is now not just the model of the organisation, but it is the medium that enables the organisation to conduct its business. IT is the retail premises, the warehouse, the documents, the distribution system and in, some cases, the factory.
That IT is the medium is well understood by some organisations such as Amazon, Betfair, Ebay, Apple and Google.
How can most US and European companies afford to keep EA in an IT box and IT in its own box?
May 29, 2012 at 12:44 pm
100% agree with everything you say.