Stress-test Your Enterprise Architecture: The 7 Questions to Ask

Defining an Enterprise Architecture enabling IT to successfully capturing the business requirements is a daunting task. Have I captured the essence? Will architects and business analysts understand it? Is it pushing our business forward through improved alignment between business and technology? Those sorts of questions are always spinning around when defining an Enterprise Architecture. A recent article in HBR "Stress-test your strategy: the 7 questions to ask" inspired me to think of the 7 questions that would help stress-test an Enterprise Architecture. Here's my take on those questions. In coming posts I will dive into each of the questions to further add some meat.
What do you think are the relevant questions to ask stress-testing en enterprise architecture?

Here's my 7 questions stress-testing your Enterprise Architecture:

1. What is the driving purpose behind the business?
• The enterprise architecture is there only to support the business purpose, right? Making sure that the architecture supports, enables and drives business is make-or-break. The reminding 6 questions assumes that the right business purpose is in the bulls-eye.
2. Which critical effect are you aiming for?
• Be extremely sharp on the effect that the architecture should deliver in its own right. It's easy to do a lot of everything and nothing of what is important. Measure and visually communicate current state and progress. Avoid finding yourself in a state of active inertia.
3. What is the key customer value proposition that is supported?
• Your customers turn to you because they perceive a very specific value offered. Align your architecture to support that value. Never find yourself in a situation where the architecture is considered state-of-the-art and the business struggling.
4. How is complexity being killed?
• Be very clear and upfront with how complexity is eradicated from both IT and business processes through the architecture. Scale back on fancy solutions. Simplify and design for evolution. 
5. Which collaboration is generating creative tension?
• Generating new ideas and improving execution requires extensive collaboration internally and with external stakeholders. Enabling and pushing collaboration through both tools and also more importantly through open access to the central business systems will spur further performance improvements.
6. How are the implementation boundaries defined?
• Central to any architecture implementation is how it is sequenced, domains affected, and what is not touched. Without clear boundaries scope creeps during implementation. There's always this domain or system over there that needs to be touched. Timing and risk will be severely affected if the boundaries are not well defined. What not to do is as important as what to do.
7. What architectural implementation uncertainties keep you awake at night?
• Your architecture is not better than its implementation. The success depends on the way it is implemented. To succeed you have to carefully monitor the uncertainties during implementation. Which parameters you choose to keep your eyes on has to be connected with question 1 and 2; business purpose and customer value proposition. Ensure that the implementation secures successful realization of those answers.

Designing and implementing a successful enterprise architecture requires making tough, sometimes hard choices. These questions will hopefully further refine your architecture making business success a fact. There's no magic bullet that can zero in on the pitfalls of your architecture - just hard work and diligent implementation. Only then can you be confident that your architecture is on track.

More to read:

• HBR November 2010: Stress-Test Your Strategy: The 7 Questions to Ask

Enabling knowledge sharing

Sharing knowledge among peers, colleagues, and partners enables new combinations of existing individual knowledge. How to decide when, how and to whom sharing should be performed?
Dividing stakeholders into two categories; key individuals and community; it becomes easier to separate when, how and to whom knowledge sharing should be done. Key individuals are the most important peers, colleagues and partners with whom you need to share knowledge. Community are the groups of people with whom knowledge sharing benefits both parties.
I will here outline some thoughts, guidelines and examples on using key individuals and community as means of identifying knowledge sharing requirements. As example we will use a global telecommunications company with a multi-site R&D organization with deep customer and external partner relations were to define which knowledge to be accessible to whom.

• Key individuals. Simplifies sharing efforts through being aware of the key persons enabling you to continually satisfy their needs. Identify who the key individuals are, their knowledge domains, when and how they need knowledge. Be very restrictive on whom to define as a key individual. It is advisable to have a discussion with each person to gather their personal expectations. Which knowledge, when do they need it, in which format and how to access it. 
• From the example: Identifying the key individuals among the different engineering organizations, customers and partners (in all 7 internal, 3 customers and 4 partners) opened up the opportunity to tailor communication and filtering the knowledge that was made available to each of them. Some wanted only working and verified knowledge, others wanted very early ideas. Among the engineering teams very open sharing is key to successfully build upon each others experiences. With partners knowledge regarding common projects that were patented to protect IP was shared. Through the individual attention paid to each one their interests can be met.
• Community. A broader set of people in each organization can be treated. These can be development teams,. business development, sales, support, etc. Their needs on knowledge are of course also specific, but through treating them as a community it is possible to still manage their needs. If not managing them as a community they will consume too much of your resources and benefits will not materialize. A community is a simple way of giving these organizations some special treatment without having to be personal.
• From the example: Within one engineering team in Spain they had developed a new communication and message container. The actual thoughts and technologies behind these were needed by the engineering team in China in their IPTV development. Through defining the Chinese team as a IPTV community (possible including others over time) they could easily define which knowledge was needed by IPTV and make it available to that community without thinking too much on who's on the other side. Following the agreed upon depth and timings enables the Spanish engineering team to control access and still keep efficiency.

Conclusion: Identify key individuals and communities of interested parties in the knowledge you produce and that will enable much simpler control and maintenance of knowledge sharing.

The forgotten screw - How to create culture of collaboration?

Language made man into what we are today. The ability to communicate between individuals and over distances can be seen as art-work and trade in human societies already 100.000 years ago. Jesus shared bread and fish among the gathered people and got back much more than he gave away. This illustrates that when you share and collaborate you get plentiful in return.
So how can we take language and the written word to the next step and become collaborators?

Research has shown that communication between people diminishes with distance and already 100 meters makes daily communication come to a halt. To foster collaboration in an ever more global world where interaction is not just done two floors up, but across oceans. Tools are important and necessary. Without the right mindset and culture it will be hard to make it work. Let's examine some principles to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing:

• Make it fun
• People are drawn to each other when they have fun. They share experiences, knowledge and build trust within the relationship. Ensure that there is a mix of old friends and newcomers to further increase the value of networking.
• Make it easy
• Remove hurdles and thresholds to collaboration.Can the tools be accessed on the run? Is the user interface simple and time saving? Can I find what I'm searching for? Is it free?
• Make it rewarding
• Make sure that competition, financial compensation etc are playing in the direction of collaboration. The collaborative culture and tools must give the most rewards, not the old way of working. Which resources and knowledge needs to be present to start collaborating from day 1?
• Make a change for change's sake
• Change the organization, responsibilities or products. Changing one piece at a time forces people to build new networks, collaborate with new people and generating new knowledge. All the time while old relations are kept.
• Make it measurable
• Measure the level of contribution. Rate people's contributions on how valuable others were finding them. Measure where connectivity and collaboration occurs. Are we missing something in between certain organizations or countries?

Have a sincere look at your collaboration environment. Are there screws forgotten here and there? Representing lost value and rework. Knowledge and experience not shared. Are the right departments working together? What about measurements?

Get started with creating a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing!

More to read:

• MIT Sloan Magazine Fall 2010: The Collaborative Organization: How to Make Employee Networks Really Work
• Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe

Seeing is believing - how visualizing the innovation portfolio makes better decisions

Running an innovation organization effectively requires close control of two disparate dimensions - the value of the portfolio (regardless of currency - $, time, IP ...) and how investments are made (regardless of currency - $, time, IP ...). Keeping an eye out for opportunities, spotting potential issues and making prioritizations between different projects requires a good visual representation that enables all stakeholders to grasp their share of interest.
What can then be said about how such a visualization tool materializes? Which decision types are helped through improved visualization?

• Set a goal of killing at least 10% of all projects each year. With an average running time of 2 years that means that 20% of all projects get killed. The number has to be adjusted for actual project duration. 
• Decide on which metrics to measure for killing decisions. Is it time ahead of competitors? Is it potential revenue? Is it time-to-market combined with potential value. Make that number visible and make sure it gets updated regularly. 
• Set a goal of only running 20% of your projects at any given set of time. If average number of projects is 2 years that means 10% running in parallel. Measure and visualize project duration, time-to-market ((time left * market value)/resources ($, people, etc) and alignment with current strategy.
• Define share of projects on different levels - extension, incremental or radical. Kill projects from each category to keep the balance and loose in the long run.

These are just a few examples of the importance of measuring and visualizing the performance of the innovation portfolio. Which are your favorite way of illustrating innovation portfolio status?

How to formulate your strategy through co-creation?

Strategy work is often done by senior executives based on their point-of-view. While their view is often correct, it does not involve all perspectives from not just the internal stakeholders. Especially external stakeholders are left out. We think of them and their needs, but they are seldom involved. How can we then know that their needs are met?
Especially true is this about our friends in the value-chain. Based on Porter's Five Forces we try to create a strategy that gives us the largest bargaining power enabling us to carve out the largest share of profits.
What if you involved inside and outside perspectives in you strategy creation? How would such a process be like? Who would it involve? What results could come out from it? Which tools to use?
Based on a recent article in HBR October 2010 I will try to add something on tools to use. For further background, please read the article.
Challenges with traditional strategy processes are:

• Focused on economics of the firm and its industry
• Internally focused on the firm and an inside-out perspective on the industry. 
• It fails to allow for the possibility of co-creating an ecosystem whose members all win
• Growing the pie before the fight for shares begin
• Assumes that a strategy can be defined on the outset, though uncertainties often make that impossible
• Incremental approach that allows for learning and engaging outside and inside stakeholders

While thinking on how to co-create a strategy, I started to think on which tools are available to counter the issues listed above. Here are some of the tools you would need:

• Appreciate Inquiry
• Appreciative Inquiry focuses on the affirmative topic chosen. The set of questions defining the topic will enable everyone to focus their energies and ideas towards this topic. Involving many people will get them to work towards this topic and thus not go in all possible directions. Based on the topic the co-creation process is led towards a solution to that topic in an affirmative way. 
• Collaborative IT platforms
• Involving many stakeholders from throughout the organization and from external organizations requires each individual to collaborate and interact individually. A comprehensible IT platform enabling groups of people to collaborate together will drive results between opportunities of face-to-face meetings. The collaborative IT platform need to answer questions like: How spread out are your people? Which bandwidths do they have access to? What type of problems are we working with, numbers, visual, text, etc.
• Goal-hierarchy
• A Goal-hierarchy is a  very powerful way of illustrating where we should end-up. The top goal is related to the set of affirmative questions identified through Appreciative Inquiry. A goal-hierarchy answers questions like: Which goals reside in each organization or group? Which activities lead to that goal? Who are doing the activity?
• Experimentation
• The results from Appreciative Inquiry are based on co-creation involving internal and external stakeholder. They are still not validated in reality and for that you need to start small through experimentation. Which are the minimal features you need to test before you can say whether this will work or not? What result is the most critical? Create and execute experiments for these parameters to validate their legibility. Then grow the size of roll-out, risk and commitment to the new strategy. 

Which other tools are useful co-creating a strategy?

More to read:
HBR Octorber 2010: Building the Co-Creative Enterprise

Experiment driven innovation - How to use data creating novel business models

Organizations will in the future be far more responsive, far more innovative, far more analytics-minded. Experiments drive the data collection necessary to create and develop new novel business models based on customer behavior.
Which practices and methods do you use to collect real world data when creating, developing and refining you business models? The basic foundation is that in order to develop new and more valuable business models we need to collect better data. And data that are based on real behavior, not just surveys. The problem is usually where to find that data, how to analyse it and based on that knowledge draw conclusions. Here are some thoughts on how to use experiments to collect more and better data that drives innovation and novel business models.

• Go to the source. Don't let the IT department alone decide on which data and where to collect it. It is usually at the point of sophistication within the organization where the need is defined. The IT department can provide technical knowledge and tools. However, it's important that those tools are flexible and open enough to allow a wide variety of business needs to utilize them in many different settings.
• Experiment on experiments. Don't plan your experiments, rather experiment on which experiments to run. Be agile and have an environment of short turn around times. How fast can I define an experiment, execute it and collect the data? Even more important - how fast can I make changes to running experiments to counteract abnormalities. Be open, and re-evaluate your experiments often making sure you get the quality and data sets needed to see your customers need and develop business models fulfilling some of it.
• Visualize data. Make data available to everyone. It has been invested quite some money into your experiments. Others may see value in the data that you don't need. When visualizing the data new patterns and conclusions might be apparent. 
• Culture of experiments. Will your corporate culture allow experiments or will it preserve current processes? It is crucial when succeeding with experiments that there is a wide-spread support within the organization for experimentation - and for failure. In some cases failure is the best outcome since a lot of effort into otherwise doomed ideas are saved.

New business models in the future are based on thorough data collected through frequent experimentation. Organizations will no longer be able to just "think" new business models - they need to collect the data necessary to draw those conclusions. Which tools do your organization provide to do frequent experimentation?

More to read:

• MIT Sloan Management Review Fall 2010: 10 Data Points
• Dan Ariely in HBR April 2010: Why Business Don't Experiment

Crowdsourced innovation strategy through collaborative IT tools

Crowdsourcing your innovation strategy within the organization sounds like the perfect idea generation mechanism. When Whirlpool started to use IT collaboration tools in the mid-2000's to collect, share and collaborate on innovation projects it not only increased the likelihood of serendipity. A side effect was that you could track which ideas were hot - aka which topics people across the global organization were working on. Was it design, pricing or sustainability? By counting the number of projects and ideas within each domain and topic a bottom-up innovation strategy was built. Those hot topics set the innovation agenda. Crowdsourcing the innovation strategy has several novel advantages:

• Don't bother spending time and energy on what to focus on - let your people across the globe decide implicitly through how they spend their time 
• Don't think on how to engage employees and changing the innovation agenda - it's changed by engaged employees in real time responding to changes in requirements and the context where you do business
• Don't have special activities to connect people and organizations - they will find and connect with themselves were it makes sense 

Serendipity and prioritizations happens by themselves through bringing smart people together sharing ideas. Using a structured IT tool fostering collaboration will not just connect people from far away. Such an IT tool will also enable progress tracking, KPI collection and idea repository. Choosing the right IT based collaboration tool requires you evaluate and decide on:

• Who will use it? Will it be a smaller or larger set of people inside the organization? How will you engage external parties such as universities and startups?
• How will you track progress? How long will you track the progress of an idea? Will you use it as a repository to store ideas or will it be more of a project management tool as well?
• What external material will be available through the site? Who will manage it and update it? Should it be only links or will you store it locally as well?

The answer to these questions sets the foundation on what kind of IT collaboration tool you should use when enabling your employees to define the innovation strategy from the bottom and up.